The Enchanted Museum: An Architecture for Juan Muñoz
Design for the Exhibition “Juan Muñoz: In the Violet Hour,” Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Móstoles, Madrid, 2023-2024
The exhibition In the Violet Hour at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) in Móstoles focuses on the first decade of sculptor Juan Muñoz’s career. Curated by Manuel Segade, the show is conceived as “a circulatory narrative within an enchanted museum,” invoking the various galleries and museums where Muñoz initially displayed the works now on view. The show forms a spatial puzzle that recreates, within the Museum’s architecture, the different rooms that originally housed Muñoz’s early sculptures and installations.
The exhibition design assembles different spaces within the museum, such as the Fernando Vijande Gallery, located in an underground parking garage in Madrid’s Salamanca neighborhood. It was there that Muñoz held one of his early solo shows, Últimos trabajos (Last Works). This gallery is recreated in the atrium, which rises over three floors, featuring circular columns that match the original space’s dimensions. These columns echo the grid-like structure of the parking garage and support the four balconies that conform Muñoz’s piece El General Miaja buscando el río Guadiana (1984). Other recreated spaces include: the Victorian rooms with glass ceilings of the Maatschappij Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam, where Muñoz installed a zigzagging floor, the reimagined corner installation Souffleur (Prompter), first shown at Konrad Fischer Galerie in Düsseldorf (1988), and The Wasteland, a work exhibited in radically different rooms since its debut in 1996.
To punctuate this sequence of spaces, the design includes a rest area on the museum’s second floor, designed as an information hub with custom display cases and benches. This space allows visitors to explore the themes in Muñoz’s early works, which often drew inspiration from the magic and jugglery manuals shown in here. The display cases are crafted from two 19th-century oak showcases borrowed from the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, previously used by Muñoz in his 1997 exhibition Monologues and Dialogues. Reflecting the magical themes of the books inside, the cases are set on delicate metal legs that give them a floating appearance. The bench follows a similar design principle.
Ultimately, the exhibition design conceives the museum spaces as a collage of other museums’ rooms. The project explores both the virtues and contradictions that arise from contextualizing artworks in environments that, while similar, differ from those for which the works were originally conceived.
Curator: Manuel Segade with Ana Ara
Collaborators: Matteo Caro, Irene Domínguez, Jaime de la Torre
Structures: Jorge López Hidalgo
