Miquel Navarro

Mislata (Valencia) 1945

By: Isabel Tejeda

Miquel Navarro studied at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Valencia, the city where he began his artistic career mainly drawing and painting, although he would eventually turn to sculpture.

In the 1960s, Navarro explored construction structures and human figures, using drawing as his main tool. The body would remain a subject that he returned to throughout his career: as the main focus and iconography that is obvious in his early drawings and paintings or as something left out in his sculpture installations, where the city acts as a body or as an indication of its inhabitants. In that city he finds parallels with his home city of Valencia, with the clash of landscapes that arises at the limit between the city itself and its fertile hinterland. Forces such as order, chaos, time, movement, etc. operate and coexist in those spaces, created using modules and imbued with great symbolic content.

Miquel Navarro’s awards include the National Award for Plastic Arts (1986) and the National Prize of the Association of Spanish Art Critics - Arco’95 (1995). Since 2009, he has been a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando.

The many exhibitions staged during his long career include those at the Tassili Gallery (Oviedo, 1972); the Valencia Professional Association of Architects (1974); the Juana de Aizpuru Gallery (Seville, 1977, 1989 y 1995); the Joan Miró Foundation (Barcelona, 1983); the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1989); the Valencia Institute of Modern Art (Valencia, 1990); the Moussion Gallery (Paris, 1992); the Orchard Gallery (Derry, United Kingdom, 1996); the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (1997); the Palazzo Medici Riccardi (Florence, Italy, 1999); the Marlborough Gallery (Madrid, 2000); the Kinderkunsthal Villa Zebra (Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2003); the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2004, 2008); the Eglise Saint André-Maison de l’Urbanite (Liège, Belgium, 2007); and the Museum of Mexico City (2008).