Departures of note

Miquel Navarro was trained at the School of Fine Arts of San Carlos in Valencia and began his artistic career as a painter before devoting himself to sculpture from the early 1970s, while continuing to work in drawing and, in recent years, photography. He became a leading figure of the movement known as the New Spanish Sculpture, which helped renew the language of the discipline in Spain toward the end of the 20th century. In 1973 he presented his first 'Ciutat' (city), a recurring theme of his work, and later turned to iron to create larger and more resistant pieces. He gained international recognition in 1980 through his participation in the collective show New Images from Spain at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. His work is held in major museums worldwide, including the Guggenheim in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Lambert Foundation in Brussels, and the Mie Prefectural Art Museum in Japan. He won the National Prize for Plastic Arts in 1986 and was elected a full academician of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in 2008. His native Mislata inaugurated a house-museum in his former workshop and residence after years of waiting, and his monumental sculptures stand in cities including Valencia, Castellón, Bilbao, Madrid, Brussels, and Murcia, with his work also appearing in films by Pedro Almodóvar.