JUAN MUNOZ - A RETROSPECTIVE

JUAN MUNOZ (1953-2001)

Widely regarded as one of the leading sculptors of the last twenty years, Juan Munoz came to prominence in the mid-1980s, when he was at the vanguard of a return to the human form. Munoz's figures, however, are not the usual stuff of classical sculpture. Located in architectural settings, they may be seated on benches, on plinths or halfway up a wall.

Very often they are figures from a circus, a theatre or a Valasquez painting - dwarves, midgets, theatre prompters, ballerinas, captured at a moment that implies a story that must be imagined by their audience, their faces frozen in expressions ranging from laughter to aggression. Moreover, although naturalistic in execution, they are less than life-size, so that when viewed from a distance they appear to scale but when viewed from close-up they appear to be still distanced from the viewer, a favourite optical device. Some of the installations in which these figures appear can be very complex.

Munoz's largest commission, Double Bind at Tate Modern in 2001, incorporated a false storey and two elevators that rose and fell to the full height of the Turbine Hall, apparently carrying his silent figures on a never-ending journey. Accompanying the first ever full-scale retrospective of Munoz's work in the UK, this book will not concentrate solely on sculpture and installation but will also examine Munoz' drawings, performative and sound works, as well as including a selection from the writings for which he is renowned. Revelling in his description by one critic as a trickster and a showman and embracing his role as a story-teller (terminology traditionally despised in the art-world), Juan Munoz saw himself as embedded in the history of art, from Goya to de Chirico.

If in his sadly curtailed career he succeeded in making the human figure once more of vital concern, he also relocated it, through his unique vision and what he called his sleight-of-hand, to a place at once familiar and strange.