Juan Muñoz

Acquired directly from the artist in 2001

The condition report for this work will be available following installation for the pre-sale exhibition opening May 8th.
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Arguably the most important Juan Muñoz sculpture to come to auction, Conversation Piece III is one of the artist's penultimate installations, executed in 2001, just before his untimely death the same year. Scaled down slightly from human size, the work is composed of six figures that as a group present the viewer with a theatrical narrative. Despite their organic shape and gestures, there is little pretense of illusion: we can observe the scene without being forced to fully understand it. The androgynous figures cock their balletic heads – birdlike – and hold postures at once graceful and awkward.  Their teardrop forms, though bronze and of solid girth, seem to balance precariously, threatening to tip over like bowling pins, "forever moving and forever going nowhere." (Juan Muñoz in an interview with Paul Schimmel in Exh. Cat., Washington, D. C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Juan Muñoz, 2001, p. 147).

Like other seminal works, Conversation Piece, shown in 2002-2003 at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza through the Public Art Fund and Last Conversation Piece, in the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the present work quietly alters the atmosphere in which it is placed. The frozen drama enacted by the figures urges the viewer to leer and to speculate. Who are the four central figures and what are they discussing? Who are the two peripheral figures and why do they remain outside of the conversation?  We experience both the intimacy of the four and the remoteness of the two – feelings intrinsic to the viewing process itself. The figures' animation gives us an oscillating sense of vicarious involvement and estranged exclusion – typical of the artist's oeuvre.

There is an earthy liveliness to the figures that is often absent from the resolute monumentalism common to the medium of bronze. A self-proclaimed narrator, Muñoz was always willing to call the objects he made "statues instead of sculptures and to embrace the notion of spectacle and effect" (ibid, p. 146). In his attempt to perfect the "autonomous statue," Muñoz was trying to erase the connotations of stasis and stability inherent in the very root of the word "statue." (Miguel Cereceda, "Sara con espejo", ArtNotes, 27 Jan. 2010)  This enthusiasm for subtlety and suggestion manifests itself not only in the figures' relationship to each other, but in their own individual weeble-like teetering shapes.  A true student of theater, Muñoz captured those nuances of gesture that so perfectly reveal human nature. The four talking figures communicate through articulated hands and craning necks, while the two outer figures display the telltale signs of insecurity – drooping shoulders, forlorn arms and an overeager gaze. Spirited and vital, all six are decidedly of this world, and in observing their rapport, the viewer's empathy is kindled to a degree made possible only by Muñoz's profound intuition and human understanding.