Juan Muñoz
From the 1980s onward, Juan Muñoz developed a striking body of work in pieces that fuse sculpture and Conceptualism into mini mise-en-scènes, here revisited in a retrospective curated by Lynne Cooke and Sheena Wagstaff. Whether Muñoz created bulbous-based, bronze figures assembled into a strange coterie, or a pair of blindfolded individuals staring into a mirror (Staring at the Sea I, 1997–2001), or a simulacral body positioned alone (Portrait of a Turkish Man Drawing, 1993), the artist placed the human figure into elliptical scenes or else rendered the body itself in cryptic terms. Many Times, 1999, brings a higher mathematics to the conceptual and figurative stakes of Muñoz’s installation work. Consisting of a gallery room filled with one hundred human likenesses arranged in numerous clusters, the piece forms a kind of essay on the uncannily exponential. These polyester and resin grayish sculptures figure nearly identical short, bald Asian men, frozen in the act of conversing and laughing. The unflinching smiles on the men’s faces contribute to, rather than alleviate, the installation’s strange, vertiginous feel.
Muñoz’s figuration often reaches its poetic peak even—or especially—when it dispenses with the body in favor of a kind of poignant absence. Boat with Motor, 1989, roils the piece’s proverbial waves—three simple, wooden balusters—into motion. This penchant for spare yet lyric assemblages is distilled to an even purer state in First Banister, 1987, consisting of nothing but a handrail screwed to the gallery wall.
Still, the body appears to have been Muñoz’s first obsession. Even his series of canvases, revealing a knack for drawing as keen as his skill with three-dimensional works, are installed such that one of his nearby sculptures appears to stare into the interiors they depict. If Muñoz seems to take some of his cues from George Segal, he turned them toward less solemn ends. Yet there is an irreducible quality to Muñoz’s impishness, which grates—productively and provocatively—against whatever gravitas we might ascribe to his intentions.
