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Lot Essay
'Rather than declaring power by seeking to control the space around them, [Muñoz's sculptures] withdraw into themselves. Powerless and mute, they embody no universal values, no common truths, they propose no programmes for the future or the past. Friezes or freeze frames of arrested moments or movements, perhaps they are allegories of communication and its failures, of the impasse of language' (J. Lingwood, 'Monologues and Dialogues', Juan Muñoz: Monologues & Dialogues, exh. cat., Palacio de Velázquez, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid 1996-1997, p.16).
Standing before Juan Muñoz's Biting your Nails, the viewer is immediately drawn into the exquisite detail of the sculpture rendering it so uncannily real, they are left with the vivid sensation of trespass. Projecting a space of private reflection and silence, the figure is thought to be based on the artist himself, fraught with nail biting anxiety. Executed in 2000, the year of Muñoz's commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, and the year before his untimely death, Biting your Nails is just below life-size, the hunched figure gagged by his hands, the thick, lined fabric of his ill-fitting jacket and trousers, contorted lines of his face, and his unshod feet adding to the pathos of the scenario. Part of a vanguard of artists who espoused a return the figurative form, Muñoz came to prominence in the mid-1980s with his own unique meditation upon the failures of communication and human solitude, revealing a latent existentialism within the artist's work.
Muñoz would extend this metaphor to create a reflection on Minimalist sculpture. He felt the human figure, combined with Minimalism's emphasis on the physical space in which the artwork resides and its phenomenological effect on the viewer could become a way of opening up the medium. In Biting your Nails the figure is locked in a pose of detachment, mutely consumed by his own being. The scale and the elevated positioning of Biting your Nails offers an almost fugitive presence. From afar it appears life-sized, but from close-up it appears remote, sitting atop its spartan space frame. Whilst the height upon which the wall should offerthe sculpture a sense of authority and an air of judicial grandeur, the viewer is unable to bypass the latent anxiety of the man.
With distended hands muting an inaudible scream, Biting your Nails recalls the tremulous existentialism of Francis Bacon's early series of Man in Blue paintings. As James Lingwood has observed, 'Rather than declaring power by seeking to control the space around them, [Muñoz's sculptures] withdraw into themselves. Powerless and mute, they embody no universal values, no common truths, they propose no programmes for the future or the past. Friezes or freeze frames of arrested moments or movements, perhaps they are allegories of communication and its failures, of the impasse of language' (J. Lingwood, 'Monologues and Dialogues', Juan Muñoz: Monologues & Dialogues, exh. cat., Palacio de Velázquez, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid 1996- 1997, p.16).
Standing before Juan Muñoz's Biting your Nails, the viewer is immediately drawn into the exquisite detail of the sculpture rendering it so uncannily real, they are left with the vivid sensation of trespass. Projecting a space of private reflection and silence, the figure is thought to be based on the artist himself, fraught with nail biting anxiety. Executed in 2000, the year of Muñoz's commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, and the year before his untimely death, Biting your Nails is just below life-size, the hunched figure gagged by his hands, the thick, lined fabric of his ill-fitting jacket and trousers, contorted lines of his face, and his unshod feet adding to the pathos of the scenario. Part of a vanguard of artists who espoused a return the figurative form, Muñoz came to prominence in the mid-1980s with his own unique meditation upon the failures of communication and human solitude, revealing a latent existentialism within the artist's work.
Muñoz would extend this metaphor to create a reflection on Minimalist sculpture. He felt the human figure, combined with Minimalism's emphasis on the physical space in which the artwork resides and its phenomenological effect on the viewer could become a way of opening up the medium. In Biting your Nails the figure is locked in a pose of detachment, mutely consumed by his own being. The scale and the elevated positioning of Biting your Nails offers an almost fugitive presence. From afar it appears life-sized, but from close-up it appears remote, sitting atop its spartan space frame. Whilst the height upon which the wall should offerthe sculpture a sense of authority and an air of judicial grandeur, the viewer is unable to bypass the latent anxiety of the man.
With distended hands muting an inaudible scream, Biting your Nails recalls the tremulous existentialism of Francis Bacon's early series of Man in Blue paintings. As James Lingwood has observed, 'Rather than declaring power by seeking to control the space around them, [Muñoz's sculptures] withdraw into themselves. Powerless and mute, they embody no universal values, no common truths, they propose no programmes for the future or the past. Friezes or freeze frames of arrested moments or movements, perhaps they are allegories of communication and its failures, of the impasse of language' (J. Lingwood, 'Monologues and Dialogues', Juan Muñoz: Monologues & Dialogues, exh. cat., Palacio de Velázquez, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid 1996- 1997, p.16).