The Bancaja Foundation has added two works by Miquel Navarro to its art collection: ‘Figure for Battle I’ (2008), a 3.45-metre-high solid marine aluminum sculpture, and ‘Fontana’ (1993), a sculptural work brass with 3.90 meters high.
These new additions expand the artist’s presence in the Fundación Bancaja collections, where he is already represented with sculpture, graphic work and watercolours. At the same time, Miquel Navarro has ceded, for his installation at the foundation’s headquarters in Valencia for a year, the work ‘Tensión’ (1996), one of the emblematic cities in the production of the Valencian creator.
The three pieces are already exhibited at La Cúpula, the permanent space of the international contemporary art collection of the Bancaja Foundation, where works by Andreu Alfaro, Julian Opie, Helmut Federle, Imi Knoebel, Sean Scully, Günther Förg, José Manuel Ballester, Eusebio Sempere and Manuel Hernández Mompó.
Miquel Navarro (Mislata, Valencia, 1945), an essential artist in Spanish contemporary art and internationally recognized, studied at the Higher School of Fine Arts in Valencia.
In 1973 he created the first of his emblematic cities. Initially made of terracotta, it later incorporates metals such as zinc, aluminum or bronze. He presents his first individual exhibition in 1972 in Oviedo. In the following years he will do it in the Buades and Fernando Vijande galleries in Madrid or Juana de Aizpuru in Seville, among others.
In its beginnings, its participation in the exhibition New images from Spain, which was curated by Margit Rowell and took place at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in the spring of 1980, was essential for its international projection. In 1986 she receives the National Prize for Plastic Arts. That same year she participated in the XLII Venice Biennale, Spanish Pavilion, together with Ferrán García Sevilla, Cristina Iglesias and José María Sicilia. Miquel Navarro starred in the anthological exhibition that the Bancaja Foundation presented in July 2018 with a journey through more than four decades of the artist’s work with works dated between 1976 and 2018.
