Victor Mira

VÍCTOR MIRA (Zaragoza, 1949 - Munich, 2003).
"Campo santo con pedacito de cielo", 1985.
Iron and wood.
Measurements: 70 x 85 x 71 cm.
This work, which oscillates deliberately between sculpture and installation, displays one of the most persistent and personal iconographies of Victor Mira's visual language: the tomb as an image of transit, silence and spirituality. For Mira, tombs were never a mere funerary symbol; they appeared repeatedly in his pictorial, sculptural and graphic work as a metaphor of human fragility, memory and identity. Key examples of this iconography are found in his series of crosses, in drawings from the mid-seventies or in the iron sculptures of the eighties, where bodies, arches and tombs are transformed into essential signs.
Created in 1985, this work belongs to a particularly fertile moment in the artist's career. After consolidating his international presence in the early eighties, with exhibitions in Germany and the United States, his stay in New York and his work in the printmaking workshops of Southern Methodist University. Mira entered a stage of great artistic maturity. These were years of intense experimentation with matter, iron, visual memory and the construction of poetic spaces.
The work has a conceptual resonance with another key installation by the artist: Meditación acerca del agua dulce (2003). Although made almost two decades later and on a larger scale, presented at ARCO and now kept at the Museo Pablo Serrano, it shares with Campo santo con pedacito de cielo the reflection on the ritual, the sacred and the relationship between the body and the elements. Both pieces construct a space for contemplation, a place where the spectator enters rather than observes, and reveal Mira's ability to expand sculpture into the territory of poetic installation.
Mira's works are currently held in museums and private collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Reina Sofía National Art Center, the MACBA in Barcelona, the Fine Arts Museums of Vitoria and Zaragoza, the Beulas Foundation in Huesca, and the ICO Collections Museum in Madrid, among others.