AURÈLIA MUÑOZ. BEINGS, THE MOST AMBITIOUS RETROSPECTIVE ON AN ARTIST WHO REVITALISED THE LANGUAGE OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY TEXTILE SCULPTURE

• The exhibition, which coincides with the hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth, surveys five decades of Aurèlia Muñoz’s creative universe by way of more than 150 works, many previously unexhibited or hitherto not displayed in museums. It includes her emblematic macramé works, embroidery pieces, the Bird-Kites series and her winged books, among others.    
• The show opens new perspectives on “Aurèlian cosmology”, inhabited by beings: genderless, plural figures that challenge binarism, personages straddling the human and the animal and living in an interspecies space.

Museo Reina Sofía director, Manuel Segade, presented the exhibition Aurèlia Muñoz. Beings today, along with Elvira Dyangani, the former director of MACBA (2021–2026), and the curatorial team from Fundació EINA, with curators Manuel Cirauqui and Rosa Lleó, together with Sílvia Ventosa, who manages the Aurèlia Muñoz Archive.     

In the press conference to present the show, Manuel Segade emphasised how, framed inside the institution’s policy of recovering women artists, it is key to the current context because it “gives an idea of her force as an artist and the importance of a practice that has the capacity to transform, like a small lever, our understanding of recent art history”. Elvira Dyangani, for her part, highlighted her interest in the Catalan artist in relation to “working on the artwork as knowledge, which meant to emphasise aspects of logic, work, composition and philosophical thought around what she produced”.   

Silvia Ventosa, the artist’s daughter and a member of the curatorial team, explained during the presentation how the show has recovered Aurèlia Muñoz’s vision as a “total artist, a global artist who avoided placing borders between techniques and materials, using them, however, with respect and through study”. Manuel Cirauqui, moreover, explained the exhibition’s importance in “removing the typecasting” of the artist, and of “having endowed the project with a scientific committee” to “undertake the mission of contributing points of view from knowledge that has been uncommon in a reading of Muñoz’s work”. By the same token, Rosa Lleó spoke about the “unprecedented” nature of the retrospective, stressing how “we have devoted an entire room to archive material and with it we have sought to show Aurèlia’s creative process”.      

Beings is the most ambitious retrospective to date on the work of artist Aurèlia Muñoz (Barcelona, 1926–2011), a pivotal figure in the revitalisation of European textile sculpture. Organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA, the Museu d’Art Contemporari de Barcelona, to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth, the show surveys the artist’s career, which evolved from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century. It is curated by Fundació EINA via its einaidea platform, under the scientific management of Manuel Cirauqui, alongside Rosa Lleó and the artist’s daughter Sílvia Ventosa, who manages the Aurèlia Muñoz Archive, and is on view in the Museo Reina Sofía, in Madrid, in Floor 0 of the Nouvel Building from 29 April to 7 September 2026, and at MACBA, in Barcelona, from 5 November 2026.   

The retrospective unfolds across six rooms on Floor 0 of the Nouvel Building, surveying Aurèlia Muñoz’s creative universe by way of more than 150 works, many previously unexhibited, particularly her drawings, which reveal in some instances the roots of her creative process, while others are works in their own right. On view are her most emblematic pieces, over sixty stitched, knotted or woven sculptures and works, made from jute, sisal and cotton, many of them large scale. It includes her embroidery pieces from the 1960s, in a reinvention of painting, her large-scale knotted macramé sculptures from the 1970s, which leave the wall behind to take on three dimensions as beings, and the Bird-Kites or Aérostatos from the 1980s — aerodynamic mobile structures inspired by her love of origami, sailing and the machines of Leonardo da Vinci — born out of a search for lightness and spatial thought that would continue throughout her career. It is this search that led her to undertake, from the 1980s, her works with paper pulp, which she made herself from linen fibres and cotton to create sculptures, many taking the form of aerial books, mobiles and oceanic elements: anemones, algae and jellyfish she arranged in transparent methacrylate cases. Also displayed in the exhibition is a careful selection of objects and works from the artist’s personal archive, including letters, maquettes, project notebooks and photographs — objects that reveal her systematic and organised way of working.

Some of the large works in the retrospective belong to private collections in Spain and other countries and have not previously been displayed as part of exhibitions or been on view in museums, for instance the monumental works Palmera (Palm Tree, 1974) and Homenaje a Jerónimo Bosco (Homage to Hieronymus Bosch, 1971), making their display a valuable opportunity for visitors.     

On the centenary of her birth, Beings sets out to discover new perspectives on this creative world, an “Aurèlian cosmology” inhabited by genderless, plural figures that challenge binarism, personages straddling the human and the animal and living in an interspecies space. Her works foreshadowed concerns which resonate today: the relationship with the environment, human existence, and that of non-human beings, and the dialogue between the ancestral and the contemporary.

Most of the pieces on display hail from the Aurèlia Muñoz Archive, the collection of Sant Cugat Town Council and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), while four of the works in the show are part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collections. There are also works from MACBA, MoMA and private lenders. Consequently, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía would like to offer its heartfelt appreciation to the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya for its invaluable collaboration in the exhibition with the generous loan of works from its collection, the result of a donation from the Aurèlia Muñoz Archive. 

In conjunction with the show a catalogue, jointly edited by the Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA, has been published, while the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Programmes Department has organised an Inaugural Conversation on 28 April at 7pm in the Reina’s Cinema theatre with curators Manuel Cirauqui, Rosa Lleó and Sílvia Ventosa, and a Study Session on the work of Aurèlia Muñoz, held on 10 June in the Museo’s Auditorium 200.

Madrid, 28 April 2026
 

The exhibition is organised by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and MACBA, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona

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