Juan Muñoz (1953-2001)
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Juan Muñoz (1953-2001)

Untitled (Pasa a mano)

Details
Juan Muñoz (1953-2001)
Untitled (Pasa a mano)
wood and metal supports
57½in. (146cm.) long
Executed in 1987
Provenance
Galerie Tanit, Naila Kunigk & Walter Mollier, Munich.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.
Exhibited
Washington, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Smithsonian Institution, Juan Muñoz, October 2001-January 2002, no. 21 (illustrated in colour, p. 105). This exhibition later travelled to Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, April-June 2002 and Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum, January-March 2003.
Special notice
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium

Lot Essay

This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity.

"Do you really need a handrail to go up the stairs or is it just a reassuring image? These bannisters are very strongly related to the body and to the passageway, to going through. They come from that moment when you lean on a balcony. I wanted to flatten the handrails so they become useless. At the same time, pressed up against the wall like that, they look like a balcony. They even share the same wooden structure at the top" (Juan Muñoz, exh. cat., Palacio Velázquez, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid 1996, p. 64).

Untitled (Pasa a mano) from 1987 is one of the first of Muñoz' explorations on the theme of passageways and insecurity in which he used the subject of the bannister to capture both a sense of boundary and of instability, creating a work in which he condenses the limitations and the fragility of life itself.

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