Muñoz, Blanca
(Madrid, 1963)
www.blancamunoz.com
Blanca Muñoz is one of the leading sculptors on the national scene today. She has a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid and furthered her training first in Rome, where she went on a grant from the National Museum of Engraving (1989) and the Academy of Spain (1990–1991), and later in Mexico (1992–1993). At first, she worked in engraving, which earned her a National Graphic Arts Award in 1999, but after her stay in Mexico she veered towards the practice of sculpture, for which she is currently more famous. Since 2010, she has also designed jewellery which retains the formal spirit of her sculptures; her jewellery pieces are endowed with delicate movement and made of curved shapes with clear cosmological and biomorphic echoes.
Muñoz’s preferred material in her sculptures is stainless steel, which she prizes for its physicality, its sense of lightness and its particular relationship with light. With this material at the fore, her sculptural output has evolved from shapes designed with rods making drawings in space to geometric bodies created with sheet metal. They started smooth but became perforated after 1996, as she cuts and solders the metal, generating volumes and empty spaces which play with light. She has gradually added colour achieved through electrolytic processes which confer a characteristic iridescence on her pieces.
