Aurèlia Muñoz. Entes
- C-print
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Aurèlia Muñoz. Entes Aurèlia Muñoz
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid April 29–September 7, 2026
On a traditionally scorching August afternoon in Madrid, two friends and I nearly brushed past the Aurèlia Muñoz (Barcelona, 1926–2011) retrospective as we entered the Museo Reina Sofía. One of my friends, a conservator at the museum, casually asked if I had seen it already. I peered into the room, immediately struck by the bright, vast embroidery on the opposite wall. I certainly had not, and my friend excitedly ushered us in, explaining Muñoz’s background as a textile artist, noting that Muñoz had learned macramé knots from her aunt while convalescent. Synchronicity seemed to be in the air. Muñoz was prolific, producing hundreds of works, several notable for their scale and intricacy. The Museo Reina Sofía’s impressive retrospective, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of her birth, does justice to her career with over 150 works on display.
Upon entering, the curatorial team immediately guides the viewer’s attention to her massive embroidery pieces, such as Tòtem (1967), and Homenaje a Jerónimo Bosco, (1971) that ask us to simultaneously contemplate her meticulous craftsmanship, innovative use of textile, and stylistic approaches in her work. Muñoz’s early work combines Surrealist and Gothic influences, while drawing on Romanesque imagery, particularly Catalan Romanesque, and pre-Columbian textile traditions. Her later work increasingly explores Cubist spatial constructions and textile sculpture’s occupation of space. From the start, the retrospective captures the spirit of what makes Muñoz’s work so profound.
Muñoz was avant-garde in her use of textile as her medium, and a foundational contributor to the contemporary canon of textile art as part of the Nouvelle Tapisserie movement. In this retrospective, we are first introduced to the artist’s two-dimensional embroidery pieces that showcase her mastery of the craft and the surrealist elements of her early work, and emphasize the artist’s use of the medium and present her concept of embroidery as painting. We are then guided to her impressive, large-scale, three-dimensional textile sculptures and later works that show Muñoz embracing spatiality and lightness. We follow her career as she continually experiments with different formats and materials and evolves stylistically. This curatorial flow also moves us through her oeuvre with awe, as we continually uncover new, innovative approaches in material and style in the artist’s work.
Perhaps it is no wonder that Muñoz learned macramé while convalescent, as the intricacy and complexity of her work also suggest tenacity. The curatorial team from Fundació EINA, which included the artist’s daughter, captures the sense of magic in her impressive body of work in Aurèlia Muñoz. Entes.
The retrospective is on display at the Reina Sofía until 7 September 2026, before continuing on to run at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Muñoz’s native city, from 5 November 2026 to 29 March 2027.
Alexander Hughes
Alexander Hughes is a cultural critic and writer based in Madrid and has previously contributed to C-print