Juan Munioz

Madrid

From February 14 to July 9, 2023, Sala Alcalá 31 (Madrid) presented the exhibition Juan Muñoz. Everything I see will outlive me, bringing together some of the artist’s most iconic works from the 1990s to 2001, the year of his untimely death. To mark what would, in June, have been the 70th birthday of one of Europe’s major 21st-century artists, Sala Alcalá 31 and Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo are holding this double exhibition – curated by Manuel Segade and in partnership with the Juan Muñoz Estate – spanning the last two decades of his intense career. The show at Sala Alcalá 31, designed as an installation of installations, is particularly significant for works like Plaza, a piece that has been brought from the Kunstsammlung K21 Düsseldorf, having not been seen in Spain since the artist’s exhibition Monologues and Dialogues in Palacio de Velázquez at Museo Reina Sofía in 1996. Comprising 27 figures of Chinese citizens laughing uproariously, it is the exhibition’s centrepiece. It is joined by other works including Dos centinelas sobre suelo óptico (1990), where the patterned perspective flooring receives spectators with a baroque spatial anxiety or Boat accident with motor (1990), which refers to a state of suspended wandering on a never-ending voyage, but also evokes the shipwreck of its fatal destination, just as Carpet Piece III (1993) alludes to the obstruction of movement.