

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Image: © Albright Knox Art Gallery/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence
Artwork: © Succession Alberto Giacometti / DACS 2022
Created in 1997, Conversation Piece presents a theatrical yet restrained mise-en-scène in which a cluster of four anonymous figures is arranged in a manner suggestive of a social gathering. Entirely unique and prominently installed in the grounds of Buckhorn – the Mallin’s house at Pound Ridge. New York – this four-part bronze work delivers an emblematic iteration from this landmark series by the Spanish artist Juan Muñoz. Begun in 1991, the Conversation Pieces would evolve over time, transforming from the towering robed forms of the present grouping into the bulbous-based figures of the very last works in this series, the final example of which is today housed in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. Indeed, this series is undoubtedly the most significant and celebrated of the artist's ouevre with other examples housed in further museum collections worldwide including, Tate, London; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia in Madrid.
Cast in bronze, the figures of Conversation Piece are finely executed; their subtle facial expressions, sightless eyes, and wonderfully articulated robes possess a texture that echoes the appearance of papier maché. Grouped in a social arrangement, the gestures and countenances here extoll a powerful sense of narrative and story, and yet, while these figures appear to interact with one another – with two physically touching – truthfully, each figure exists in isolation: the gaze of one is blindly met by another, the mouths are closed and mute, while each hand gesture is neither received nor reciprocated within the grouping. The viewer here observes an unsettling and arcane, yet solemn and powerful, assembly of individuals. Painted monochrome slate-grey, these pieces evoke the existentialist-sculpture of Alberto Giacommetti as though subject to the later twentieth-century influence of minimalism. The monochrome lack of individuation, coupled with each figure’s muted facial expression, sightless eyes, and alienation from one another, delivers an allegory for powerlessness and failed communication – a formidable response to a sense of loneliness and estrangement that pervades the contemporary human psyche.
“Their silent narratives eddy and flow tantalizing around the beholder, deaf to the content but not to the allure of their silent cadences.”

Image: © Roger Coulam/Alamy Stock Photo
Artwork: © DACS 2022
The figures’ hand gestures, muted expressions, and cautious physicality provide an oscillating sense of vicarious involvement and estranged exclusion; an idiosyncratic quality particular to Munoz’s contribution to art history, an oeuvre that was sadly cut short in 2001 with the artist’s premature death. A self-proclaimed storyteller, Muñoz encouraged calling the objects he made “statues instead of sculptures” as a means to “embrace the notion of spectacle and effect” (Juan Muñoz quoted in: Exh. Cat., Washington D. C, Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Juan Muñoz, 2001, p. 147). However, in so doing, and through his attempt to perfect the “autonomous statue”, Muñoz aimed to erase connotations of status and stability embedded within the very etymology of the word (Miguel Cereceda, “Sara con Espejo”, ArtNotes, 27 January 2010 (online)). His enthusiasm for subtlety and the suggestive is here made manifest, not only in the relationship between the figures, but also via their physical expressions. A true student of theatre, Muñoz captured nuances of gesture with exquisite detail to enliven the monumental and heavy medium of bronze. Divested of the power of speech or sight, the figures of Conversation Piece nonetheless communicate through articulated body language: energised hands and craning necks here strain to counteract an overbearing mutism. In the drooping shoulders, forlorn arms, and overeager gazes of the figures, Muñoz emphasises a sense of powerlessness in the face of spirited protest. Standing amongst the vital yet solemn dynamic of Conversation Piece, the viewer too is both drawn into and excluded from the conversation, as we stand apart, on the periphery, looking in. Exhibiting the exquisite qualities of his endlessly and emotionally contemplative oeuvre, the viewer’s empathy is made possible only by Muñoz’s profound intuition and human understanding.