lluís alexandre casanovas blanco evokes collage of museums at juan muñoz show

Juan Muñoz: In the Violet Hour at CA2M in madrid

Architect Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco has completed the design for Juan Muñoz: In the Violet Hour — a new exhibition at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) in Móstoles, Spain. Curated by Manuel Segade, the show, nicknamed The Enchanted Museum, focuses on the first decade of the Spanish sculptor’s career and is conceived as a giant puzzle, as ‘a circulatory narrative’ invoking the various galleries and museums where Muñoz initially displayed his early works and installations on view.

all images © José Hevia

Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco’s exhibition design

The exhibition design at the CA2M museum 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 Juan Muñoz held one of his early solo shows, Últimos trabajos (Last Works). The architect has recreated this gallery 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 the sculpture‘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.

Juan Muñoz: In the Violet Hour at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M)

To punctuate this sequence of spaces, Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco 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 Juan 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.

circular columns echo the grid-like structure of the parking garage in Madrid’s Salamanca neighborhood

invoking other museum spaces within a museum

Ultimately, the exhibition design by Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco reimagines the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo 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,’ concludes the architect. Juan Muñoz: In the Violet Hour commemorates the 70th anniversary of the birth of the Spanish sculptor.

a show curated by Manuel Segade and designed by Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco