Miquel Navarro (Mislata, Valencia, 1945) belongs to the generation of Spanish artists born around the mid-forties who work and develop new precepts of the sculpture derived from the movements of the neoconstructivista, minimalist, and conceptual. It is, along with Adolfo Schlosser (1939), Eva Lootz (1940) and Susana Solano (1946), one of the leading members of what is known as the “New Spanish Sculpture”.
Exposure Monuments and many, adopts the title of the last city that the sculptor has created. It is a large-scale installation made in solid aluminum, composed of hundreds of pieces, meticulously arranged and organized and that create the fabric symbolic of a city. As in other cities-installation carried out previously
by Miquel Navarro, the artist does not try to represent a real city or ideal or utopian, but to create a city poetic, metaphor of the world around us and ourselves.
Although it is common in the cities of Miquel Navarro, the human being does not appear to be represented and that no trace of him —as was typical in environments metaphysical by de Chirico— yes, that is an essential part as a subject-spectator ends of the shape of the work. The human also appears evoked through the sensations arising from the installation and Monuments, and the Crowd. The coldness, the lack of communication. The power, the submission, the alignment. Dreams, wishes. Sex. The feeling of drama and tension is generated from the compulsive repetition of elements, and the contrast of scales, which not only adds rhythm to the composition, but also places the viewer in front of a landscape where the order and the chaos they share the same space.
Next to the city's Monuments and crowds, the exhibition will consist of about thirty sculptures: bodies, shapes, compositions, objects, landscapes and still lifes. Made using geometric shapes assembled that emphasize the idea of construction, the object is located between the art work and the engine. In these works appear evoked concepts such as the synthesis of nature, figurative-abstraction, vertical-horizontal, unity-multiplicity and timelessness. In the reaffirmation or not these concepts, influences the material used in each case: aluminum, iron, terracotta, zinc and brick, as well as the composition, the colour and the scale. Miquel Navarro made his first individual in the Gallery Tassili (Oviedo)
in 1972. In the eighties, is part of the group of artists who exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In 1986, he awarded the National Prize of Plastic Arts. Since then the work of Miquel Navarro has been incorporated to the bottoms of the most important museums and public collections such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS), Madrid, spain. National museum of Art Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), Barcelona. Valencia institute of Modern Art (IVAM), Valencia. Foundation Lambert, Brussels, Belgium. Museum Wilheim Lehmbruck, Duisburg, Germany. Museum Wurth, Künzelsau, Germany. Mie Prefectural Art Museum, Mie, Japan. Basque museum of Contemporary Art (Artium), Vitoria. Museum of Contemporary Art Patio Herreriano, Valladolid.