Juan Muñoz

June 17, 2023–January 7, 2024

This exhibition commemorates the 70th year since the birth of the artist Juan Muñoz (Madrid, 1953 – Ibiza, 2001). In recent decades, no other Spanish artist had achieved such international fame, with a dazzling career from his first exhibition in 1984 until his untimely death at the age of 48. The show—which will be a prolongation of the exhibition on view at Alcalá 31 between February and June 2023—will focus on the first ten years of his practice.

The exhibition hall is caught between reality and fiction or, in other words, it keeps reminding us—like a reflection in a mirror—that reality is no more than a particular mode of representation. Straddling two centuries, Muñoz’s work was an outpost for the speculative shift that now characterizes art in the immediate present.

Learn more at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo.

From February 14 to July 9, 2023, Sala Alcalá 31 will present the exhibition Juan Muñoz. Everything I see will outlive me, bringing together some of the artist’s most iconic works from the 1990s to 2001, the year of his untimely death. To mark what would, in June, have been the 70th birthday of one of Europe’s major 21st-century artists, Sala Alcalá 31 and Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo are holding this double exhibition – curated by Manuel Segade and in partnership with the Juan Muñoz Estate – spanning the last two decades of his intense career.

The show at Sala Alcalá 31, designed as an installation of installations, is particularly significant for works like Plaza, a piece that has been brought from the Kunstsammlung K21 Düsseldorf, having not been seen in Spain since the artist’s exhibition Monologues and Dialogues in Palacio de Velázquez at Museo Reina Sofía in 1996. Comprising 27 figures of Chinese citizens laughing uproariously, it is the exhibition’s centrepiece. It is joined by other works including Dos centinelas sobre suelo óptico (1990), where the patterned perspective flooring receives spectators with a baroque spatial anxiety or Boat accident with motor (1990), which refers to a state of suspended wandering on a never-ending voyage, but also evokes the shipwreck of its fatal destination, just as Carpet Piece III (1993) alludes to the obstruction of movement.

This exhibition will afterwards continue at Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo from June to November 2023. The gallery, directed by Manuel Segade, will house diverse installations, sculptures, drawings and paintings from the first decade of his career, which will be displayed on two floors of the museum, presenting a Juan Muñoz that is as yet unknown.

Learn more at Sala Alcalá 31.

June 25–October 16, 2022

The first retrospective of drawings by Juan Muñoz brings together more than 200 works loaned by institutions and private collectors, offering a comprehensive but intimate presentation of a fundamental and constant facet in Muñoz’s practice.

Emerging in the early 1980s, Muñoz was one of the leading artists of his generation. Shortly after, he began to exhibit his work internationally, with solo presentations in galleries and museums and in important survey exhibitions like the Venice Biennale or Documenta IX in Kassel. Though Muñoz was renowned for his enigmatic sculptures and for his installations of rooms with figures, drawing played a particular role for him—drawing as a thought, a sketch, or a fully developed work on paper. His drawings can be understood as part of his sculptural works or as independent narrative scenes. 

The exhibition, curated by Dieter Schwarz, is structured chronologically as a sequence of 12 sections addressing different themes of the artist’s work. Each section recreates past exhibitions in which Muñoz incorporated drawings—reuniting the artworks for the first time—and groups works from specific periods in Muñoz’s practice.

Learn more about the exhibition at Centro Botín.

(New York, London, Paris & Hong Kong—July 9, 2020) David Zwirner is pleased to announce its exclusive worldwide representation of the Estate of Juan Muñoz. The Estate comes to the gallery on the recommendation of Marian Goodman. Marian Goodman Gallery has represented Muñoz’s work since 1990 and has mounted six shows in New York between 1991 and 2015. David Zwirner is looking forward to continuing to promote and further the legacy of Juan Muñoz. The gallery is planning a solo exhibition of Muñoz’s work for New York in the spring of 2021, curated by Vicente Todolí. Juan Muñoz: Six Rooms will be on view at the gallery’s Chelsea spaces and will include six major installations by the artist, from 1986 to 2001, that exemplify the formal and perceptual breadth of his sculptural works.  

Juan Muñoz was among the most significant artists to rise to international prominence in the mid-1980s and 1990s. In his formally inventive works, which range from isolated architectural elements that suggest a human presence to evocative large-scale installations comprising figures arranged in groups, Muñoz sought to foreground the relationship between the art object, architectural space, and the viewer. Until his untimely death in 2001, at the age of forty-eight, he produced an extensive body of work that include not only sculptures and installations but also drawings, writings, sound works, and curatorial projects that uniquely explore the narrative and philosophical possibilities of art. 

As curator Neal Benezra describes, “While Muñoz is committed to resolving the form and content of a particular object, a parallel interest centers on its conceptual and emotional underpinning.… [Muñoz opens] his work to a panoramic range of references and borrow[s] freely from the history of art as well as from architecture, literature, music, and theater. Ultimately he does so not to clarify or resolve his position, but rather to complicate and enrich a body of work dominated by silence and absence and their psychological implications.” In the artist’s own words: “Sculpture is space by negation. When placed in the right space, it takes over the powers that already existed there and joins them.”

David Zwirner will be the Estate of Juan Muñoz’s exclusive commercial gallery. In this role, David Zwirner will promote the legacy of the artist through curated exhibitions at its New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong gallery spaces, and through the development of new scholarship on the artist’s work through publications and international exhibitions.

As stated by David Zwirner, “We are honored to begin working with the Estate of Juan Muñoz, an artist whom I knew for many years. I have greatly admired his profoundly engaging work since my earliest days as a gallerist in the 1990s, when he was at the vanguard of an international group of sculptors that was reinventing the medium. His work remains as relevant today as it was then. His Estate comes to us from Marian Goodman, who presented a number of extraordinary shows of his work during his lifetime and for many years after. I want to thank Marian profoundly for suggesting that we could be a beneficial partner. Our work with the Estate will begin with a large-scale presentation of Muñoz’s work at our New York gallery next spring, curated by Vicente Todolí, one of the foremost experts on the artist’s work.”

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Image:  Juan Muñoz, Conversation Piece, Dublin, 1994. Installation view at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 1994. Photo by Kristien Daem. Courtesy Juan Muñoz Estate