Juan Muñoz. Retrospective Date: April 22 - August 31, 2009 This exhibition, which the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía dedicates to Juan Muñoz (Madrid, 1953 – Ibiza, 2001), is the most complete retrospective on the artist to date. The exhibition has been enriched by works never exhibited until now and extends throughout several rooms in the Museum, as well as the Sabatini Gardens. His drawings, writings, sound works and radio segments are exhibited together with numerous sculptures. Juan Muñoz is an international point of reference in the renovation of contemporary sculpture. The sixteen years spanning from 1984, the date of his first solo exhibition, to 2001, when he created his last work, allowed him to develop an artistic corpus with an exceptional narrative quality. There exists a significant tension between unreal and tangible spaces in his work. His figures have an extraordinary physical presence in which silence and solitude acquire a particularly central role. Acrobats, dwarves, dancers and Asian characters are joined by his famous human figures with a round base that seem to interact among themselves, which make up his signature series known as Conversation Piece. His artistic production explores the notion that “artwork is as much the solution as it is the search,” particularly in his pinnacle work Double Bind (2001), which was also his last work. After receiving the National Plastic Arts Award in Spain in 2000, Juan Muñoz was the first Spanish artist invited to exhibit his creations in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London in June 2001. He died two months later at the height of his career, at age forty-eight, shortly before the opening for his retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington.
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