Widely regarded as one of the leading sculptors of the last twenty years, Juan Munoz came to prominence in the mid-1980s, when he was at the vanguard of a return to the human form. Munoz's figures, however, are not the usual stuff of classical sculpture. Located in architectural settings, they may be seated on benches, on plinths or halfway up a wall. Moreover, although naturalistic in execution, they are less than life-size, so that when viewed from a distance they appear to scale but when viewed from close-up they appear to be still distanced from the viewer, a favourite optical device.
If in his sadly curtailed career Munoz succeeded in making the human figure once more of vital concern, he also relocated it, through his unique vision and what he called his sleight-of-hand, to a place at once familiar and strange.
With texts by Sheena Wagstaff, Adrian Searle, Justo Navarro, Lynne Cooke, Alberto Iglesias, Jan Avgikos and Luc Sante.