The disturbing radicalism of Juan Muñoz reaches Setdart.

Juan Muñoz is undoubtedly one of the leaders in the renewal of contemporary sculpture . His short but brilliant career has left us one of the most disturbing, radical and lucid artistic testimonies of the existential crisis of modern man. Halfway between sculpture and installation , the Madrid artist directly challenges the viewer by creating an image that encourages us, and even forces us to get involved in the work. An example of this is the enigmatic and monumental creation that we will put out to tender on the 15th in an auction where, above all, the wealth of artistic expressions that it gathers stands out.

Since his first solo exhibition in 1984, Muñoz became a member of the first generation of artists to reintroduce figuration to the art scene. However, his aesthetic conception will soon make him stand out thanks to his extraordinary ability to build atmospheres and spaces charged with a mysterious drama, against which indifference is not possible.

The artist Juan Muñoz with one of his works.
Lot: 35120665. JUAN MUÑOZ (Madrid, 1953-Ibiza, 2001). "Untitled", 1987.

In the case that does not occupy, Muñoz constructs an image loaded with confrontations and visual tensions in which the presence of the tiny boat stranded in front of the immense closed shutter becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of communication, silence and isolation of the individual. In this sense, the presence of the blind, as well as other everyday objects such as balconies, were recurring elements in the production carried out in the 1980s. These elements that he extracts from their usual context and that he always presents walled up or closed, became an ironic symbol of the feeling of loneliness, where the game between the visible and the invisible, the certainty and the mystery, invites us to reflect on the strangeness and contradictions of our own existence.

In short, the artistic corpus that Juan Muñoz left us stands as an implacable narrative of a world that, having lost his way, has condemned the human being to abandonment and alienation. The powerful and impressive vision of the human condition, with which Muñoz questioned us, managed to conquer and astonish the art world as well, even become the most prestigious and sought-after sculptor of his generation, being the first to exhibit his work in the Turbines room of the Tate Modern in London.