The artist Juan Mu±oz, who died on August 28th 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.
Currently, his vast and daring installation Double Bind is on show at Tate Modern, London, where it opened in June.
Juan Mu±oz said 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 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.
Juan Mu±oz was born in Madrid, the second of seven children. In the mid-1970s, he came to England, where he studied at Croydon School of Art and at the Central School of Art and Design.
Although he was influenced by, respectively, the drama of American minimalism and the poetry of Italian Arte Povera, he consistently went his own way, at a tangent to fashionable movements.
With Juan Mu±oz, 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.
Juan Mu±oz was a regular visitor to Ireland and exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Museum-goers will know him for his instantly-recognisable Conversation Piece. This was conceived for the museum's courtyard during the artist's 1994 exhibition, Silence Please.
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 Juan Mu±oz 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.
Juan Mu±oz was also interested in sound, and in particular 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 the collaborations between Juan Mu±oz and critic John Berger, Will It Be A Likeness?, won a best play award on German radio in 1996.
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.
The life of the peripatetic contemporary artist is fraught. Juan Mu±oz was driven, and never stopped. Work on the Tate commission, and a 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.
Juan Mu±oz: born 1953; died, August 2001