Miquel Navarro

MIQUEL NAVARRO (Mislata, Valencia, 1945).
"Torre cega", 1987.
Terracotta.
Signed and dated on the inside of the base.
Measurements: 69 x 21 cm.

The sculptural work of Miquel Navarro is characterized by creating architectural spaces, totemic beings that sacralize the three-dimensionality of the place. This terracotta is a great example of this affirmation, since the stylized aesthetics, added to round but synthesized volumes, bring us closer to a completely symbolic conception. Starting from figuration, the piece ascends towards an abstraction of pure and emphatic forms that are not detached from reality but aspire to the immutable. The rigorous forms, volumes and hollows are presented as a game in which light and shadows play a major role. The rotundity and the totemic are appreciated in this monumental figure.

Painter and sculptor, Miquel Navarro is today considered one of the most internationally renowned Spanish artists, as well as one of the most representative of the new Spanish sculpture of the seventies and eighties, especially oriented to the expanded space of installations, as well as interventions on nature and actions on the body. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Valencia and began his career in the early sixties, exhibiting in 1973 his first "Ciutat", in clay, a concept of prototypical work that integrates sets of small pieces configured as structures and various constructions ranging from the rural to the urban and from the environmental to the industrial. Later he began to use iron, as it allowed him to make larger and more resistant sculptures. In 1980 he made the international leap with his first exhibition in New York (Guggenheim Museum), which was followed by others in Berlin, California, Mexico, Florence, etc. In 1986 he was awarded the National Prize of Plastic Arts, and in 2008 he was elected member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. He has monumental sculptures in several Spanish cities and abroad, and is represented in the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Reina Sofia Art Center in Madrid, the Georges Pompidou in Paris, the MACBA in Barcelona, the IVAM in Valencia, the Mie in Japan and the Wurth Künzelsau in Germany, among other public and private collections.