Oscar Muñoz shows at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino
This exhibition features a selection of works from his recent retrospective at the Blanton Museum of Art and video works from the artist’s Intentos series
Dates and Venue:
1 September – 3 November 2022
Sicardi Ayers Bacino gallery, Houston, Texas
Oscar Muñoz: Intentos/Attempts is Sicardi Ayers Bacino‘s fifth solo exhibition for Oscar Muñoz [b. 1951, Colombia/Lives in Colombia]. Intentos
[Attempts] features a selection of works from his recent retrospective at the Blanton Museum of Art and video works from the artist’s Intentos series. This series, that prizes process equally with product, aligns itself with Muñoz’s decades-long experimentation with the field of photography, applying the image-capturing process to non-traditional mediums such as charcoal and water in methods that invite the element of chance to engage with themes of memory and mortality. A text written by Blanton Museum of Art curator Vanessa K. Davidson accompanies the exhibition.
Oscar Muñoz, 3-3A, 2008. Magnifying glass and four contact negatives installed on wall, 1 5/8 x 4 3/8 in.
Installation view of Oscar Muñoz: Intentos / Attempts at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, 2022.
Photo courtesy Tom Dubrock
Davidson writes, “These artworks lay bare the mechanical structures of some of his finished, polished pieces to reveal the process behind works that themselves posit process itself as an artistic act. In these Intentos, Muñoz takes his chosen media apart to see how it works from the inside out, then reconstructs it from ground zero in experimenting with his desired effects. This approach is intricately connected to his pivotal process of deconstructing photography. Over the course of six decades of artistic practice, Muñoz has radically reinvented the medium, creating hybrid works that splice photographic processes with drawing, painting, printmaking, installation, video, and sculpture, as well as interactive works. Or, in his words, in all of his diverse works, ‘invariably employing the photographic act and its chemical nature as both reference and metaphor.’ Connected to this assertion are integral, intertwined themes: the very transience of images, which he relates to the fragility of memory and the precariousness of life itself—and the human impossibility to defend against the impermanence of all three. Adopting photography as a tool to be deconstructed and made into metaphor, he compels us to reconsider how memory itself is made into meaning through works predicated on process.”
Installation view of Oscar Muñoz: Intentos / Attempts at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, 2022.
Photo courtesy Tom Dubrock
In these Intentos, Muñoz takes his chosen media apart to see how it works from the inside out, then reconstructs it from ground zero in experimenting with his desired effects.
Installation views of Oscar Muñoz: Intentos / Attempts at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, 2022.
Photo courtesy Tom Dubrock
Oscar Muñoz, Intento del jueves (Narciso) (detail), 2003-2020. Single-channel video installation, mute, Video: 3:01 min.