Juan Muñoz - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 12, 2007 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    Juan Muñoz's works often create narratives of interplay and exchange, by situating his sculptures in relation to his viewers. As subject and object interact, the threshold between spectator and sculpture is blurred. Constantly testing the boundaries of interaction between the artist, the artwork and the viewer, his sculptural works create a compelling investigation into the possible relations among space, object, and audience. Pelotaris (Looking Left) is also characterized by an intense study of the ambiguous line between the observer and the observed, subject and object, inside and outside. Muñoz proposes a world in which his statue is alive and looking at us, just as much as we are looking at it. But rather than seeking to control the space around it, it withdraws into itself. Unable to move or speak, Muñoz’s figure becomes an allegory for the failure of communication and the impasse of language.

    “Muñoz’s figures are always either self-absorbed or involved in some enigmatic interchange that renders them obvious to all else. Never soliciting any engagement with the viewer, their impregnable self-preoccupation cachects their audience, thereby creating a relationship as unsettling as that generated between the architecture that shelters them and the discombobulated spectator.”
    (L. Cooke, ed., Juan Muñoz: Interpolations, New York, 1999, p. 12)

255

Pelotaris (Looking Left)

1999
Polyester resin.
57 x 22 x 19 in. (147.4 x 55.9 x 48.2 cm).

Estimate
£200,000 - 300,000 

Sold for £333,600

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

Evening Sale
13 October 2007, 4pm
London