Spanish sculptor Muñoz depicted dwarfs with dignity, humanity
January 19th, 2008
His work is featured in a major new retrospective at the Tate Modern in London.
From the [UK] Telegraph:
Between the late 1980s and the mid ’90s, Muñoz made a number of important works featuring dwarfs (defined by Little People of America, an organisation providing support to people of short stature, as any adult with a genetic or medical condition resulting in a height of less than 4ft 10 in). But Muñoz is by no means the only artist to have done so.
From antiquity to the present day, countless artists have portrayed people with dwarfism, including Bosch, Veronese, Rubens, Van Dyck, Tiepolo and Velázquez.
… Muñoz remained reticent about the meaning of his dwarf sculptures. “When I meet a dwarf I feel uncomfortable. It is not my fault. But I feel strange,” he once said. Yet his dwarfs are not supposed to conjure feelings of “otherness”.
His sculpted dwarfs possess great dignity. Silent and serene, they appear locked in melancholic thought. “My characters sometimes behave as a mirror that cannot reflect,” Muñoz once said. “They are there to tell you something about your looking, but they cannot, because they don’t let you see yourself.”


