Miquel Navarro City Metaphors

Selections from the IVAM Collection

CIFO Art Space, Miami │ April 11 - May 12, 2013

In commemoration of the V Centennial of the discovery of the State of Florida by Ponce de León and the founding of St. Augustine (United States’ oldest city) by Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés 450 years ago, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) and the Institut Valencià d’Arte Modern (IVAM) are pleased to present the exhibition Miquel Navarro. City Metaphors. Selections from the IVAM Collection.

The new Spanish sculpture from the seventies and eighties which drew on the legacy of Spanish masters like Julio González, was characterized by the expansion of the field of sculpture installations to encompass installation art, and by interventions dealing with nature and actions on the body. The work of Miquel Navarro (Mislata, Valencia, 1945) holds its own particular value, one that has strongly prevailed over time with firmness and discipline in the international art scene.

His unmistakable representations of cities or “clusters” –as he refers to them– constitute a prototype he uses for his sculptural installations when grouping together small pieces, configured as diverse urban buildings, ranging from houses to factories, from ornamental to representational. Their structure is based on what is clearly an imaginary urbanism, a key aspect of Navarro’s works, now part of the IVAM’s permanent collection thanks to the generous donation of 515 pieces. This collection of works reflects his different stages allowing viewers to appreciate his creative style.

Miquel Navarro’s work uses principles of construction that link it to sacred forms. The first of these principles is the works’ relationship to the external world, to nature itself. His aim is not to create bodies or objects that already exist in the tangible world, but rather to construct vital signs that reveal the order, harmony, permanence and the structure of things.

With these key ideas in mind, his work could be summarized as installations and assemblages arranged as sculptural landscapes, which range from the rural to the urban, from nature to the industrial. In this sense, his work -as the exhibition City Metaphors suggests- explores the simultaneity of different seasonal environments to create a sort of Cubist chronology where antiquity and modernity merge in figures such as buildings, industry, and cities that merge past and future.

Hence Miquel Navarro uses the city’s heartbeats to situate himself within contemporaneity. In this exhibition the artist seeks to establish a dialogue with his work via a dynamic language of sculpture that frames him as a creator of dreams, ideals and metaphors. This selection of works from the IVAM’s Collection will reveal two fundamental aspects of Navarro’s work: the fusion of his sculpture with architecture and his vision of the city.