Sculptor Miquel Navarro dies at 81

BarcelonaValencian sculptor Miquel Navarro has died this Sunday at the age of 81, reports the Mislata City Council, the town where he was born and lived. In a statement on social media, the council remembers Navarro as a "cultural reference and key figure in the creation of the house-workshop that bears his name and in the artistic legacy that will always remain in Mislata". "He leaves an indelible mark on our city, and on Valencian culture," says the City Council, as reported by the Efe agency.

Miquel Navarro, born in 1945, trained at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Valencia and began his artistic career as a painter, although from 1972 he dedicated himself almost entirely to sculpture. His work is characterized by the representation of the city as a sculptural landscape, with a language that unites sculpture and architecture. Since the seventies, he developed installations and sets of small elements that evoke urban landscapes, and later he also created monumental sculptures in public spaces.

In 1968, he participated in the collective exhibition Our self, in Valencia. His first solo exhibition was at the Tassili Gallery in Oviedo, in 1972, the same year he created an experimental piece, The chimney volcano, made with refractory material, loose sand, and incense. From 1973, he developed one of the essential lines of his entire career: the cities, sculptural sets that turn space into an urban metaphor.

From 1974, he focused his work on sculptural landscapes, installations, and assemblies of small variable elements that evoke urban landscapes and blur the boundaries between sculpture and architecture. In these compositions, he used materials such as clay, lead, zinc, aluminum, terracotta, glass, stone, plaster, and wood. His international recognition was boosted by his participation in 1980 in the Images from Spain exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

During the eighties, his miniaturized sets evolved towards monumental works, both in galleries and in public spaces. In 1984, he installed in Valencia the sculpture popularly known as The pink panther, and in 1989 he presented at the Crystal Palace in Madrid Paranoid Minerva, a large iron figure. He also developed public sculptures such as Fraternity, in Barcelona; Moon mouth, in Brussels; and The little dragonfly, in Valencia.

Among the recognitions he received are the National Award for Plastic Arts from the Spanish Ministry of Culture in 1987, the CEOE Arts Award in 1990, the ARCO Art Critics Association Award in 1995, the Distinction for Cultural Merit from the Generalitat Valenciana in 2002, and the Julio González International Award in 2008.

His work became part of world-class museums and collections, including the Guggenheim in New York and Bilbao, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Lambert Foundation in Brussels, and the IVAM. In 2005, he donated to the IVAM more than 500 works and artist notebooks that reflected his creative evolution since 1964.