Juan Muñoz

Galería Marga Paz, Madrid
Sale: Philips de Pury & Company, London, Contemporary Art, 22 June 2007, Lot 25
Private Collection, Athens

Athens, Bernier-Eliades Gallery, Juan Muñoz: A Brief Description of My Death, 1999-2000
Mallorca, Centre Cultural Sa Nostra, Art Report 2009, 2009, p. 63, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the patina tends more towards bright verdigris in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is wear to all four edges of the wooden base and further spots of wear to lower part of the base. There is some light scattered oxidisation to both bells.
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Ballerina, part of Juan Muñoz's first series of bronzes devoted to dance and ballerinas, successfully engages with the figure while at the same time remaining within the formal discipline of minimalism.   Standing between the past and the present, the muted colours, textured body, classically reticent figure brings primal echoes of the past to balance atop the clean lines of her wooden plinth. Greeting the viewer as a stoic idol the modelled features relay an impersonal figure void of individual expression.  Waist deep in a heavy rounded bowl, Ballerina anticipates impossible movement across her truncated stage.   The tension between the assumed mobility inherent in the definition of a ballerina and the reality of her weighted stasis creates an emotional and psychological response in the viewer; a reaction that Muñoz believed to be of paramount importance. 

Borrowing freely from a multitude of sources in literature, mythology, philosophy, music, film, poetry, theatre and illusion, Juan Muñoz merges distinct and seemingly oppositional elements within his sculptures creating his own unique path between formal concerns and subjective matter.   One of the most significant of the first generation of artists to achieve maturity in post-Franco Spain, and one of the most complex and individual artists working today, Muñoz's reinvigoration of figurative sculpture within the modern cannon places him in the company of other artists in the lat 1980's such as Charles Ray, Jeff Wall, Robert Gober and Kiki Smith.

Juan Muñoz died, tragically young, in 2001, but left an artistic legacy that has been celebrated in numerous books, articles and museum exhibitions the world over. He once said (in 1990) that "I can never make art outside of our history". For Muñoz, much of his own production was deeply influenced by the art of his forefathers, illuminating his connection with two of Spain's most important artists: Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Goya.

Ballerina is from the acclaimed series executed between 1989 and 1990, where he redefined figurative sculpture, standardizing (rather than differentiating) the repeated figurative form in what was a dramatic departure from (then) contemporary practice. The idea of standardizing, of creating secluded figures, would become a leitmotiv for the artist. The form echoes that of the image of Queen Mariana (1652-53) by Velázquez, so that the semi-sphere base here becomes the three-dimensional rendition of the painted portrait's enormous farthingale and dress.