Museo Miquel Navarro

Almost forty works by Miquel Navarro, some of which are part of the heritage of the Fundació Miquel Navarro of the Valencian Community, make up the exhibition ‘Lunar Metropolis’, which opened yesterday at the Goya Museum in Zaragoza and which can be visited until 22 December.

The symbolic duality between the spiritual and the earthly is the focus of this exhibition, which explores Navarro’s most personal universe since the 70s, through towers, moons, references to ancient cultures and universal concepts such as power, fragility and mystery.

In this sense, the curator of ‘Lunar Metropolis’, Lola Durán, highlights the presence of the moon as a ‘metaphor of the unattainable that illuminates the shadows of existence’.

As a whole, the exhibition, which includes some unpublished pieces, is a reflection on the existence of memory and the passing of time. It is also a reflection of the duality between the urban and the rural in Miquel Navarro’s life: from his childhood in Mislata, a town then surrounded by orchards, to the clearer influences of industrial growth with factories and trains. 

These contrasts in Navarro’s work ‘become dialogues between the intimate and the monumental, the ancestral and the contemporary, a dialogue between what is shown and what is hidden, and also between the earthly and the spiritual’.

The exhibition at the Goya Museum will be complemented by the exhibition of three mini-cities in the Mobility City space of the Ibercaja Foundation.

Photo: Goya Museum

Mislata Town Council continues to collaborate with Miquel Navarro Foundation of Comunitat Valenciana, with the aim of promoting knowledge and research in the cultural field, as well as to promote artistic events and activities in the sculptor’s hometown, where he currently lives and works.

Both entities have today signed a collaboration agreement whereby the council allocates a grant of 30,000 euros to the foundation, both for its maintenance costs and for carrying out a series of activities aimed at promoting and publicising the life and work of Miquel Navarro to the different associations and educational groups in Mislata.

These activities include the possibility of a series of guided tours of the renovation work and the adaptation of the headquarters of the Fundació Miquel Navarro, a monitored tour of the public sculptures that the artist has installed in the municipality, and a projection-colloquium of the artist’s audiovisual production in any municipal facility intended for cultural use.

In addition, the foundation undertakes to temporarily lend works by Miquel Navarro to those events organised by Mislata Town Council related to the Visual Arts, in which their exhibition is considered appropriate.

Last March, works began on the adaptation of the sculptor Miquel Navarro´s workshop in Mislata, in order to house the centre-foundation where his artistic legacy will be exhibited and disseminated.

The architectural project has been designed by the Valencian studio Nebot Arquitectos and the execution is being carried out in coordination with the Board of the Miquel Navarro Foundation and the authors of the Museum Plan, David Gimilio Sanz and Jaume Penalba Alarcón.

The works, financed by Diputación de Valencia with a grant of 676,000 euros, will continue throughout the summer and are scheduled for completion in October.