Artwork: Juan Muñoz, Conversation Piece III, 2026, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
Spanish artist Juan Muñoz is often described as a storyteller. However, what’s interesting is that he seems to inspire people to want to tell stories about his art. Recently finished, an exhibition of Munoz’s work featured at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid—a truly wonderful gallery to experience, especially the Goyas—titled, Juan Muñoz. Stories of Art. The title evokes an iconic art historical text by Austrian art historian, Ernst Gombrich, that was written primarily for young adults, The Story of Art, but in relation to Muñoz, it is the correlation of his work and storytelling that is centre stage. I was fortunate enough to find at a second-hand bookshop an exhibition catalogue of Juan Muñoz from the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, 1994, where the curator had asked writers such as John Berger, Marina Warner, Adrian Searle, Lynne Tillman, William Forsythe and others to respond to the question: How can words reach beyond descriptions or critical analysis to convey our experience when we encounter a work of art? Each writer responded to one of Muñoz’s artworks with a fictional story, making this a fascinating and engaging interpretation of his work.
Muñoz lived in Madrid and was a frequent visitor of the Prado, inspired by the artwork of Velázquez and Goya and the art traditions of the Renaissance, Mannerism and Baroque. Muñoz once said: “I think the great Baroque artists were asked to do the same as modern artists: to construct a fictional place. To make the world larger than it is.” One of the key works of the exhibition was Conversation Piece III. Influenced by the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti, Muñoz created a series of these configurations of sculpted figures throughout his career. Conversation Piece III was situated on the first floor in the main gallery amid the lush paintings by the Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens. Muñoz’s figures appeared as silhouettes against the colour and vibrancy of Ruben’s work. Interestingly, American art critic Dave Hickey wrote a story about an earlier version of this artwork from the Dublin exhibition titled Mayflies, a strange conversation between an American and Spaniard, supposedly friends, who were in a roundabout way, settling a gambling debt. The silent communication of the figures, their gestures, positioning and attitude, prompts the viewer to wonder: What are they talking about? And in response, we fill the space between them with our own musings and words.