Fact and fable: Juan Munoz: employing conceptualist strategies and the illusionistic devices of theater, the late Spanish artist Juan Munoz left behind an extraordinarily rich and varied oeuvre. His idiosyncratic sculptures, drawings and installations are currently on view in a major touring retrospective, his first in the U.S

Art in America, Oct, 2002 by David Ebony

By the time of his death in Ibiza on Aug. 28, 2001, Juan Munoz, at age 48, had achieved a level of respect and recognition in the international art community that is afforded few contemporary artists. A fatal aneurysm abruptly ended a nearly 20-year career, during which the Spanish artist was recognized for his ability to expand the possibilities of figurative sculpture and installation art. He had more than 50 solo shows to his credit, and his work had been included in numerous international exhibitions such as Documenta (1992) and the Venice Biennale (1993). He won Spain's prestigious art prize, the Premio Nacional de Artes Plasticas, in 2000.

In early June 2001, less than three months before his death, he completed his most ambitious work, Double Bind, a vast installation for London's Tate Modern. While on vacation in Ibiza, he was anticipating the fall opening of the first major museum survey devoted to his art, to debut at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden before embarking on a U.S. tour. What was intended as a midcareer retrospective opened in Washington as a memorial exhibition on Oct. 18, 2001. It is now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago [to Dec. 8].

Featuring some 60 sculptures, installations and drawings created from the mid-1980s to early 2001, the show was organized by Neal Benezra when he was deputy director and curator of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago (he was recently appointed director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). Working in collaboration with the show's coordinating curator, Olga M. Viso of the Hirshhorn, Benezra chose many of Munoz's best-known works as well as a group of rarely exhibited early pieces.

In Washington, two major works were displayed outdoors. One was an upside-down, nearly life-size human figure suspended by a cable fastened around one ankle; that cable was attached to another wire bisecting the circular courtyard. Dangling high above a fountain, the eerie, gray-patinated bronze, Figure Hanging from One Foot (2001), is Munoz's final sculpture. In many ways, the work exemplifies his approach to art-making as well as the sense of intrigue that permeates much of his oeuvre. Indicating perhaps a prisoner who fell from a ledge, a bungee jumper, an acrobat, an escape artist or a man being tortured, the finely wrought figure, wearing loose-fitting pants and jacket, suggests a tense drama. The piece is ambiguous in every way except in its ability to convey a feeling of helplessness. Inside the building or on the ground beneath this figure, removed and distant from it, the viewer feels powerless and frustrated in determining the cause and outcome of the figure's bizarre predicament. Metaphorically, if not literally, the work is suspended somewhere between reality and fiction.

Situated on a lawn in front of the building and part of the museum's permanent collection, Munoz's bronze figure grouping, Last Conversation Piece (1994-95), suggests a state of exclusion. Here, five figures made of light gray bronze have bald heads and slender arms and torsos. Instead of legs, the bodies end in bulbous, sacklike forms, like oversized beanbags. Despite their awkward appearances, the figures seem highly animated. In a fixed arrangement, three of them appear to be engaged in an intense discourse, whispering and gesticulating. Two elements placed some distance apart seem to be ostracized by the main group. They correspond to the viewer's sense of being outside the scene, forever in the dark as to the information being passed among the figures.

This installation is part of a series of works featuring schematic, androgynous-looking, pear-shaped figures. Related bronzes, "Conversation Pieces I-V" (1991), filled one room inside the museum; at approximately 4 1/2 feet tall, the sculptures have generalized facial features; like bottom-weighted, uncapsizable toys, they might easily rock from side to side with just a slight push. At one end of the gallery, a figure pressed its ear against the wall as if eavesdropping on a conversation in an adjacent room. In these pieces, Munoz's interest in theatricality and the figure corresponds to contemporaneous experiments by a generation of artists who emerged in the mid-1980s, including Robert Gober, Charles Ray, Kiki Smith, Stephan Balkenhol and Thomas Schutte.

Born in Madrid in 1953, Munoz grew up in a middle-class family during the last decades of the repressive Franco regime. Studying privately with Santiago Amon, a leftist critic and editor for the newspaper El Pais, Munoz was introduced to international vanguard works of literature and art. He briefly studied architecture at the University of Madrid before moving to London with his brother Vicente in 1970. After traveling extensively in Europe for some years, he returned to London in 1976 to enroll at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, where he earned a degree in printmaking. While attending New York's Pratt Graphic Center in 1981, he received a Fulbright Fellowship and subsequently served as an artist-in-residence at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City. In 1982, he returned to Spain, settling in Torrelodones, a Madrid suburb, with his wife, the Basque sculptor Cristina Iglesias, whom he had met several years earlier in London.