Juan Muñoz has installed three single figures in the Oratory near the Anglican Cathedral where Salcedo is exhibiting. The Oratory has been used for the display of assorted Victorian sculptures, including a large bronze near the centre of the space. Muñoz has installed his resin figures - entitled Broken Noses Carrying a Bottle- within this context. At first sight these new additions to the space may seem consistent with the existing Victorian statuary. However, one soon notices their strangely animate character, combined with an equally unsettling dissimilarity to real human bodies. While the heads of the figures are derived from life, the bodies are made from clothing stuffed with soft material and then cast in resin. As anatomical representations the figures are loose and provisional, and yet the materials out of which they are constructed contain the traces of other, absent bodies.


Although many of Muñoz's sculptures initially seem playful, they also have a darker side. In reproduction the figures made of fibreglass look as if their skin has been burned, scarred or melted. In reality they are remarkably similar to calcified objects from a limestone cave, stalagmites that have been polished by the hands of countless visitors. The figures often seem to be in suspended animation, as if suddenly immobilised - like Medusa's victims or the inhabitants of Pompeii - but fully conscious. Sometimes the eyes are propped open with matchsticks. I recall standing in front of Las Meninas with Muñoz in the Prado in 1991. He spoke of the terror of Spanish painting and, rightly or wrongly, it was the terror of fixation or entrapment implied by representation itself that I took him to be referring to. In his sculptures, with their eyes pinned open, there is no respite from either the world or consciousness. The figures are like the desperate insomniac in a joke I recently heard: "He had tried everything. Finally he blasted his head off with a shot gun . . . but he still couldn't sleep."

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Juan Muñoz has installed three single figures in the Oratory near the Anglican Cathedral where Salcedo is exhibiting. The Oratory has been used for the display of assorted Victorian sculptures, including a large bronze near the centre of the space. Muñoz has installed his resin figures - entitled Broken Noses Carrying a Bottle- within this context. At first sight these new additions to the space may seem consistent with the existing Victorian statuary. However, one soon notices their strangely animate character, combined with an equally unsettling dissimilarity to real human bodies. While the heads of the figures are derived from life, the bodies are made from clothing stuffed with soft material and then cast in resin. As anatomical representations the figures are loose and provisional, and yet the materials out of which they are constructed contain the traces of other, absent bodies.


Although many of Muñoz's sculptures initially seem playful, they also have a darker side. In reproduction the figures made of fibreglass look as if their skin has been burned, scarred or melted. In reality they are remarkably similar to calcified objects from a limestone cave, stalagmites that have been polished by the hands of countless visitors. The figures often seem to be in suspended animation, as if suddenly immobilised - like Medusa's victims or the inhabitants of Pompeii - but fully conscious. Sometimes the eyes are propped open with matchsticks. I recall standing in front of Las Meninas with Muñoz in the Prado in 1991. He spoke of the terror of Spanish painting and, rightly or wrongly, it was the terror of fixation or entrapment implied by representation itself that I took him to be referring to. In his sculptures, with their eyes pinned open, there is no respite from either the world or consciousness. The figures are like the desperate insomniac in a joke I recently heard: "He had tried everything. Finally he blasted his head off with a shot gun . . . but he still couldn't sleep."