Juan Muñoz

The Renaissance Society is proud to present the first one-person United States museum exhibition of Madrid artist Juan Munoz. Over the last decade Munoz has made visual and verbal metaphors in an effort to understand his personal integration within the workings of the world, and because he doesn’t, in his words, “…know any other way to explain to myself what it is that troubles me.” The Society has invited Munoz to incorporate its unique exhibition space as a catalyst for generating an entirely new body of drawings and sculptural installations.

Munoz’s drawings—dark, relflective and chalky renderings of interior hallways, living rooms, bedrooms, small apartments—are compellingly perspectival, presenting deep vistas and winding views into corners, recesses, and half-opened doors. Chairs, tables, mirrors, and beds not only depict the contents of each room but play theatrical roles in the construction and delineation of human space, informing the manner in which one visually travels through the drawings like negotiating furnished rooms in the dark.

Munoz’s sculptures turn these visual effects into poetic physical experiences, inducing very spatial and time-consuming negotiations. Munoz’s use of architectural fragments as objects—and his positioning of them—creates oddly physical and acoustic situations in which viewers are continualy aware of their body’s position and their experience of privacy and displacemment, privilege and voyeurism, volume and silence. There is an enticing muteness that accompanies this sort of transient investigation, a silence that words and verbal analyses obstruct and destroy.