Order in chaos: Rosa Muñoz

Rosa Muñoz | Understanding chaos
Marbella, 3 December 2020

Within the framework of the first Marbella Gallery Weekend, the Isolina Arbulú gallery presents a journey through the work of the outstanding Spanish photographer, a crucial representative of the staged photography that is made in our country. This exhibition also introduces her most recent work, a leap between photography and sculpture.

"The semantics of forms" poses an interesting conceptual game to the spectator on the question of the interpretation and meaning of art.

"Rosa Muñoz, one of the greatest exponents of constructed photography, in which her first works are inscribed, has not ceased throughout her artistic career to experiment and push her own language, overflowing it and conquering a third dimension. This sign of identity in which the artist is recognised in her latest productions, places the spectator in front of enigmatic and informative pieces that reveal the fundamental questions that Muñoz has been tackling.

Born and raised in Madrid, this artist-photographer with a long and renowned career is present in both public and private, national and international collections of reference, such as the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Gas Natural Fenosa (MACUF), Centre Nacional d`Art Georges Pompidou (Paris), Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid, Estampa Collection, Museo Municipal de Arte Contemporáneo Conde Duque de Madrid, Caisse de Dépôt et Consignation in France, Conca Collection, Pilar Citoler Collection and Houlihan Lokey Collection, among many others.

From the outset, Rosa Muñoz's work shows a continuous decontextualisation of objects and spaces. They are tamed exterior places or demolished interiors, always inhabited despite the invisibility of their dwellers. Inhabitants evoked through furniture in inexplicable contexts, discordant with which the artist makes a social critique of the moment. The artist establishes her own rules to deconstruct the scene incessantly and reconvert it into an impossible, into a new and personal narrative.

This permanent deconstruction and construction in Muñoz's work has led the artist to atomise images in order to explore the link, the expressive and visual capacity of any fragment of them. In this exercise of breaking up and composing, she incorporates wood and cellulose as supports that allude to a now physical nature, which has always been present in her work through her images.

The artist has formally resituated her work through her latest productions, giving it a third dimension through multiple perspectives, the result of superimposing printed fragments. They are manually manipulated images, broken, shattered, splintered, which reach the spectator as a metaphysical allegory of the primordial image from which they originate. A work that is forged on the unfinished limits of its edges. The constant representation of fracture leads through a transit that arrives at the beauty of a new story.

Thus Rosa Muñoz, in this new production, starts from photographs of stacked art books, formalising sculptural compositions of abstract impression, where each piece is intimately interconnected with the other, as an essential part of a whole. An accurate formula for conceptually approaching the viewer to the infinite process of construction of contemporary art, showing its genealogy and the generation of knowledge through time. These works of countless readings transcend their own conceptual intention to evoke a neuronal morphology, representing surprising and weightless brains that show the anatomical maps of thought.

A paradigm of understanding through a fragmented reality, about the formulation of art as a kind of alchemy and continuous rethinking. An exercise in understanding chaos, which the artist carries out far from habitual patterns".

Text by Julieta de Haro,
Cultural manager, exhibition curator and contemporary art consultant.