Miguel Navarro – Escultura Íntima

(…) Siempre me ha gustado la naturaleza, en todas sus manifestaciones pero especialmente cuando asume y expresa la huella de lo humano en su sentido más ecológico y respetuoso. La arquitectura es una gran arte. Su sentido utilitario y de servicio no está reñido, o no debería estarlo nunca, con la calidad y belleza de obra artística. Antes al contrario, aunque a mí me interesan en primer lugar su carácter simbólico y alcance metafórico, cualidades presentes en el arte más personal y subjetivo. Mi obra no es utilitaria en el sentido funcional de la arquitectura, en ese sentido yo voy directamente, como artista a construir poemas con formas escultóricas. (…)

The city represents the most eloquent material expression of the cultural nature of the human being, constituting a unique civilizational testimony to the convergence of regenerative creative impulses within societies. Miquel Navarro’s “city” shapes an idealized landscape that conveys multiple dimensions where a memory of past times is reflected and, simultaneously, a surreal, fantastic, and metaphysical territory emerges, uniting in the same reality a particular way of perceiving the world and the dreamlike dimension of its artistic expression.

Miquel Navarro was born in Mislata, Valencia, Spain, where he currently lives and works. Between 1964 and 1968, he mainly focused on painting, having attended the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Valencia. In the early 1970s, he began practicing sculpture, creating in 1973 the first of his city series, La ciutat 1973–1974. He held his first solo exhibition in 1972. In 1986, he received the National Fine Arts Award from the Spanish Ministry of Culture, and in the same year, he represented Spain (alongside Ferran García Sevilla, José María Sicilia, and Cristina Iglesias) at the 42nd Venice Biennale. Since then, he has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions both in Spain and abroad, notably the 2005 exhibition at the IVAM (Valencian Institute of Modern Art), after which he donated over five hundred works representative of his career to the institute; and one of his more recent solo exhibitions, Monumentos y Multitud at the Fernández-Braso gallery in Madrid in 2014. He has public art sculptures in various Spanish and European cities, such as L’Almassil, created for the Main Square of Mislata, Valencia, in 2010, and more recently Casa de Passo for the 10th International Symposium of Contemporary Sculpture in Santo Tirso in 2015.

Álvaro Brito Moreira

Exhibition Curator | Director of MIECST/MMAP