Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Cabota

Image caption
MIQUEL NAVARRO

Cabota

  • 1990
  • Patinated iron
  • 262 x 82 x 57 cm
  • Cat. E_101
  • Acquired in 1993
By:
Isabel Tejeda

Miquel Navarro’s sculptures and installations are easily recognisable: they are created using small constructions with clear analogies with the structure of a city. Cabota (1990), however, is a full-relief sculpture, one of many totems that Navarro produced. The artist himself has said that its erect, phallic form is not an allusion to sexuality – the allusions to homosexuality in his work are more obvious in his photography and in his early, small works –.

These totem structures are usually accompanied by other, identical elements which surround them and emphasise the confrontation between vertical and horizontal powers and represent a metaphor for the idea of submission. However, in the case of Cabota those objects are replaced by the observers surrounding the piece who have to look up to see it. It is therefore a vertical structure of power with echoes of the artist’s monumental public art works.

Cabota emerges from the floor and seems to provide it with a head. Its title, in fact, means ‘big head’ in Catalan, with the secondary meaning of ‘stubborn’.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Miquel Navarro
Mislata (Valencia) 1945

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).

Isabel Tejeda

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.