The artist Juan Muñoz, who has died suddenly aged 48, was the most significant of the first generation of artists to achieve maturity in post-Franco Spain, and one of the most complex and individual artists working today.
Muñoz has died at the height of his powers. Currently, his vast and daring installation Double Bind, the second in the Unilever commissions for the Turbine Hall, is on show at Tate Modern, London, where it opened in June. In October, a mid-career retrospective of his work is due to open at the Hirschorn Museum in Washington DC, travelling to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
About Double Bind, Muñoz said that he wanted to give the Tate "an occasion for wonder", and in this installation, with its false, optically patterned floor, real lifts which ride from the top of the building, through the floor and down into a false, car park-like basement, he has done just that. He also gives the audience glimpses of the populous balconies and unnerving alleys of a city, constructed between floors. Double Bind is enormously engaging, beguiling and generous, in that it is a vast work in which the artist never lost his idea of privileging the individual spectator. You are led from illusions of vastness and emptiness, to places of intimacy, in which you feel like a voyeur.
Muñoz was born in Madrid, the second of seven children. Pressed about growing up in Franco-era Spain - where he was expelled from school - he once said that he probably had a much happier childhood than any child in Britain sent off to public school. In the mid-1970s, Muñoz came to England, where he studied at Croydon School of Art and at the Central School of Art and Design. It was in London that he met his wife, the sculptor Cristina Iglesias, with whom he had two children, Lucia and Diego; all of whom survive him. In 1982 he went, on a Fulbright scholarship to New York, where he met Richard Serra, and spent time assisting Italian sculptor Mario Merz.
Although he was influenced by, respectively, the drama of American minimalism and the poetry of Italian Arte Povera, Muñoz consistently went his own way, at a tangent to fashionable movements. How unlikely it was that a young Spanish artist in the early 1980s would announce himself with a sculpture of a minaret, placed temporarily in the Plaza de Toros in Malaga.
With Muñoz, even a walk down the street became a performance, a game. He understood that sculpture, far from standing alone or aloof, only made sense in human terms. Or rather, that what made sculpture interesting was its relation to the world about it, the lives we lead. He understood the potential, and the enigma, of the simplest human gesture. In many ways, much of his work looked old fashioned in its concentration on the human form, and in the use of such motifs as the ballerina, the dwarf - simple human presences .
Why make it look new, he asked, when it will only look old later. Yet he did make things anew, and reinvigorated figurative sculpture with his massed crowds of laughing, grimacing life-sized Chinese figures (whose heads were all derived from the same Belgian art nouveau bust), his choreographed single and multiple groups, his lone dwarf standing at the end of a long corridor, or among columns. His ventriloquist's dummy, perched over a precise and seemingly limitless abstract floor pattern (this last, a work called The Wasteland, influencing a scene in David Lynch's Twin Peaks) showed him to be a master at orchestration and placement, understanding the importance of absence as well as presence in the deployment of sculpted figures and false architectural details within real space.
Once, he paced out the dimensions of a gallery filled with Giacometti's works, only in order to understand the ratio between the Swiss artist's diminutive figures and the architecture which it seemed to perceptually possess and distort. He was hungry to understand the mechanisms of scale and size, and subjective human perception. In the same way, he would look at the Renaissance architecture of Borromini, at Islamic tiles, at the sculpture and photographs of Medardo Rosso, and see in them something absolutely modern and relevant. His eye, as well as being acute - though colour-blind - was acquisitive. He saw the potential of poetry in things, and translated what he saw into an inimitable art. Critics of a theoretical bent had Muñoz as a "post-conceptual, post-narrative" sculptor; "Me," he said, "I'm a storyteller."
He understood other storytellers, was fascinated as much by Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad as by the most extreme art of his own time.
He was the best of companions. One was caught in the shrapnel of his intellect, a rain of references, caustic laughter, an infectious fascination for the world about him. He was curious about the shadows on a wall, the shape of a doorway, the human life going on around him. This is reflected in much of his work, not least in the manipulated, cast figures which populated his sculpted environments - at the Tate there are men looking out into emptiness as they lean on balconies (a recurrent image), card players in the shadows, games with the possibility of narrative and emotion, enigmatic moments frozen in space and time. All of which was always held in check, or presented as a conundrum, as a singular, inexplicable silent moment.
But not always silent, or static. Muñoz was also interested in sound, and in partic ularly the possibilities of radio. Certain of his figures were fitted with animatronic devices, so that a figure sitting alone on a bench, or standing looking at its own reflection in a carefully placed mirror, might mouth silent words; or a pair of little figures, sitting in a shoe-box, might whirr around the gallery on a little railway track.
One of his works for radio, a collaboration with the composer Gavin Bryars in the early 1990s called A Man In A Room Gambling, had Muñoz explaining card tricks and sleights of hand over a lilting Bryars composition. Muñoz wanted this series of 10 five-minute vignettes broadcast like the weather forecast, on successive evenings. In the live performance of the work at a BBC radio theatre in London in 1997, it was preceded by a "reading" of the coastal weather reports by the ubiquitous Peter Donaldson.
One of the collaborations between Muñoz and critic John Berger - they became close friends in recent years - Will It Be A Likeness?, won a best play award on German radio in 1996. This year, he was collaborating with his brother-in-law, the composer Alberto Iglesias, on a performance and radio play.
Muñoz, in many ways, was an outsider in his own country. A vociferous critic of the mediocrity of recent appointees to major Spanish cultural institutions (whose jobs are at the whim of the government of the day), he was fearless in his public pronouncements. He could be a withering critic, and fiercely partisan. Although he lived and worked just outside Madrid, he made his career elsewhere in Europe and America.
Never invited to represent his country at the Venice Biennale, last year's award of Spain's major cultural prize, the Premio Nacional de Bellas Artes, gave him a certain wry satisfaction. "I think I'll buy a watch," he said.
Yet he was extremely generous to other artists and writers, both in Spain and elsewhere. Recently he had been setting up funding for a small and beleaguered Spanish poetry magazine he admired, and persuading other international artists, like Douglas Gordon, to collaborate in supporting it. He was an inveterate arm-twister, a maverick. He liked to give the impression of being a gangster, in what he called the "killing fields" of the contemporary art world.
Such an intemperate reputation masked great tenderness and sensitivity. Yet he once browbeat me to help him steal a plaster bust from a swanky hotel (under the eye of the receptionist), so that he could "borrow it" to make a cast for a sculpture.
The life of the peripatetic contemporary artist is fraught. Muñoz was driven, and never stopped. Work on the recent Tate commission, and his forthcoming American retrospective, was interspersed by constant travels, other projects and enthusiasms. He once said his work was about a man in a room, waiting for nothing.
He often complained about the demands on his time, and his desire to just get back to the studio and draw. Just to draw, and empty his head with a bottle of very good wine. And to astonish, always to astonish.