Aurèlia Muñoz: Building with Fibre

🖼️ 🖼️ 🖼️ Exceptional; important enough to justify planning a visit around it.

Ongoing until September 7, 2026

Aurèlia Muñoz, Ens místico, 1977. Photo taken by the author.

The first impression of Aurèlia Muñoz. Beings at the Reina Sofía, is structurally commanding. The exhibition gathers more than 150 works across five decades, including embroideries, macramé sculptures, bird-kites, drawings, handmade-paper works, models, and archive materials. It is the most ambitious retrospective yet devoted to Muñoz, and it coincides with the centenary of her birth. The exhibition exposes how belated this recognition is for an artist of such inventiveness, structural audacity, and international reach.

Muñoz’s works subverse the common assumption about textile art as soft domestic craft, less intellectually intense or artistically serious than sculpture, architecture, or painting. They powerfully dismantle that hierarchy in art history with carefully arranged knots, cords, suspended skins, and aerial structures which manifests not only her creativity but also ways of thinking. As curator Elvira Dyangani described Muñoz’s practice as “working on the artwork as knowledge, which meant to emphasise aspects of logic, work, composition and philosophical thought around what she produced.” Muñoz shifts the discussion of textile art away from patience, sensitivity, and manual skill, the familiar language used to contain women artists, and toward method, structure, and thought.

Exhibition view of knotted sculptures. Photo taken by the author.

Muñoz’s textile work behaves like architecture without becoming architecture. Palmera (1974) stands as a woven vertical body: part tree, part column, part vessel, part shelter. It is monumental, but not rigid. Ondulacions (1974), made from nylon threads, occupies space in a different manner. It gathers, sinks, curves, and extends across a platform like a field of controlled force. The viewer has to walk around it, measure it with the human body, and read its suspended ropes as lines of tension.

Muñoz’s work is soft in material, but severe in intelligence. This becomes especially clear in Ens místic (Mystical Being, 1977), a suspended macramé work made with sisal and jute rope dyed by the artist. The piece has a central body but no fixed anatomy. Its hanging planes suggest wings, garments, banners, and architectural screens without fully becoming any one of them. It belongs to the world of Muñoz’s Ens — beings or entities — where textile no longer remains a surface but becomes a body in space. That in-between quality is precisely her achievement.

Exhibition View of Bird-Kites, photo taken by the author.

The bird-kites push this spatial intelligence into the air. In the long gallery, the Ocell-estel works hover above the visitor like sails, primitive aircraft, folded paper, and sleeping creatures. The museum dossier describes these “aerostats” and “bird-kites” as large canvas structures held by rods, influenced by air, sails, wind, movement, and Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machines. Their beauty is not picturesque. It comes from the fact that every visible element has a task: cord, rod, seam, counterweight, curve. They do not hide construction. They expose it. Air becomes part of the art work, not empty background.

Drawing of Aurèlia Muñoz, 1989. Photo taken by the author.

The drawings by the artist, rarely exhibited, show a mind absorbed by structures, beings, modular figures, animals, robots, and folded spaces. The exhibition guide stresses that drawing accompanied her throughout her career and formed a rigorous part of her practice, not just a preparatory tool. The photographed 1989 geometric drawing is especially revealing. Its small cubic clusters look almost architectural: little towers, houses, or folded spatial diagrams. It shows that even after decades of spatial work, Muñoz was still testing volume, repetition, and construction on paper.

The exhibition’s real importance is not just that Muñoz was a woman artist who deserves to be rediscovered, but that the very materials once used to diminish her work became the tools with which she changed sculpture. At times, the show risks dressing her work in fashionable language about ecology and non-human life, but the objects themselves are stronger than that: her paper, ropes, wings, shells, and suspended forms come from concrete acts of soaking, folding, tying, drying, hanging, and balancing. Muñoz does not need to be promoted from craft to art, because her work already proves that this division was false. She made art from fibre instead of stone, from air instead of mass, from tension instead of weight.