Juan Muñoz

Juan Muñoz, 1953 – 2001, Spain

“The spectator becomes very much like the object to be looked at, and perhaps the viewer has become the one who is on view.”

In Room 1 Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall presents works from or relating to the collection during the spring 2004. The exhibitions will run for a shorter time than the other exhibitions. One or a few works, by a single artist, will be shown at each time.

Three Laughing at One, 2001, was the last work to leave Muñoz’ studio when he died suddenly in 2001. The work is typical of his oeuvre in latter years.

Juan Muñoz was born 1953 in Spain but travelled extensively and was influenced by the London and New York art scenes. He started working figuratively in the 1980s. Before then, he had used sound and architecture in his work. He would install a balcony on a wall, a spiral staircase or part of a banister in a room, and could evoke the feeling that someone had just left or was about to enter. When these stage-like places were peopled, it was like a complement to his choreography. His figures often appear self-absorbed, or, when several figures are grouped together, as though they are so engrossed in one another that the viewer is excluded. The relationship between the room, the sculptures and the viewer was crucial to Muñoz. The viewer becomes a part of the work, perhaps even switching roles with it.

Muñoz was interested in the limitations of sculpture and the difference between how we perceive a living person and a sculpture. He claimed that the more realistic a sculpture was, the less inner life it seemed to have. He focused on that difference by making the figures in his compositions slightly smaller than life. His sculptures are often prompters, ventriloquist dolls or have an Asian appearance, at the same time their features and gestures are completely generic. In consequence, they never feel specific as portraits, even though they are realistic.

By including human figures in his works Muñoz gave them a narrative quality. He was criticised for being a story-teller, but embraced the criticism and said that his figures were perhaps characters looking for an author. Muñoz himself was a published author of both criticism and essays. His titles and subject matter often refer to drama, history, poetry and fiction. A recurrent theme in both his sculptures and writing was card tricks. One of his works, for instance, is a card table where hidden playing cards kept popping up unexpectedly (Table with Hold-Out, 1994). In Three Laughing at One two of the men we see have dice in their mouths. Perhaps they are planning or have already pulled a trick. Muñoz described his works as sleight-of-hand tricks and said that art was all about creating illusions: “For me, what you see is not what it seems to be.”