Juan Muñoz
Chopping Block, 2001
Solid wood
11.5 in. x 17 5/8 in. x 5 in. (29.21 cm. x 43 cm. x 12.5 cm.)
Edition of 26
Inspired by his disquieting tableaus, Muñoz’s fully functional cutting board presents the owner with a proposition at once playful and potentially violent. The Renaissance Society presented the artist’s first one-person institutional exhibition in the US in 1990. Throughout his prolific career, Muñoz, created visual and verbal metaphors–a poetry of wordlessness–to explore psychological experiences of alienation or unsettling displacement.
Switchblade knives figure in Muñoz’s visual vocabulary, occasionally appearing in the hand of a ballerina, beneath the ledge of a stair, or on the underside of a seemingly safe handrail. These veiled and latent threats serve to complicate and re-define our interaction with Muñoz’s characters and objects, and often exaggerate the passive/aggressive status of art objects and their viewers.
Juan Muñoz (b. 1953, Madrid) used figure as his primary subject. Muñoz’s work often features cast-sculptures in paper-maché, bronze and resin as well as delicate drawings. A self-acclaimed "story-teller," the artist reinvigorated figurative sculpture by creating the illusion of sound and narrative with his smaller-than-lifesize figures in an atmosphere of mutual interaction. In his later work, Muñoz added architectural elements to his sculptures, transforming whole floors into labyrinthine environments, as in his exhibition at the Renaissance Society.
Muñoz studied at the Central School of Art and Design, London, the Croydon School of Art, and the Pratt Graphic Centre, New York. While in New York, he was also an artist-in-residence at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Muñoz’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Recent solo exhibitions of his work include those at the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, in 2009; Guggenheim Bilbao in 2008; Tate Modern, London, in 2008; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C., in 2001; the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2001; and the Dia Center for the Arts, New York, in 1999. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1986, 1993, and 1997 and in Documenta IX in 1992 and Documenta XI in 2002. In 2000, he was presented with the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Spain's most prestigious art award.
