Sans titre - 12, 1974

Gloria Muñoz  

Glòria Muñoz is a Spanish painter and professor of painting at the University of Barcelona. Glòria Muñoz was born on August 12, 1949 in Barcelona, Spain. His family was artistically inclined. She studied in Barcelona at the Superior School of Fine Arts Sant Jordi, completing her art classes in 1972. The same year she married Josep, whose father, painter and teacher Josep Puigdengolas i Barella, helped her to meet important members of Barcelona's exclusive artistic community. This opportunity, combined with her desire to explore new methods of artistic expression, influenced her to create paintings that can trace their origins to early 20th century art. In 1975, the year of her first solo exhibition, she founded an artistic education center in Barcelona, Taller de Dibuix i Pintura. She has been a professor of painting in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona since 1985 and in 1990 received a Doctorate in Fine Arts from the same institution. In 2000, she was a member of the “Contemporary Realism” project of the Ministry of Education in Madrid. In 1980, Muñoz concentrated on painting landscapes. Its main subject was the landscape of the Empordà in northeastern Spain, but other places in Spain (Mallorca, Granada, Cap de Creus, Cadaqués, Castelló d'Empúries, El Port de la Selva and Peralada ), Italy (Tuscany) and South France was also represented in his landscapes. Later in her career, she focused on different subjects. Some of his later still lifes contain an arrangement of objects and a perspective that is more like that typical of a landscape. A convent in Peralada that had been abandoned by her Augustinian sisters became the location of Muñoz's workshop when, in 1993, she acquired the convent chapel for this purpose. This arrangement provided her with a lot of artistic inspiration as she depicted many of the details of her chapel-studio in her paintings. In her series Empty Altars, she painted the altar of the chapel. His works in this important series, comparing full and empty, present and absent, living and dead, symbolically evoke the passage of time and the separation between the spiritual and the mundane. The relationship between the spiritual world and the physical world is a theme that can be discerned in much of his work throughout his career. His palette often consists mainly of ocher and blue hues. His work mainly describes everyday objects, but there is usually a deeper meaning than just depiction of these ordinary subjects. For example, some of his favorite subjects to paint, pictures, are more than just furniture; they are symbolic of the unique and transitory nature of human life. Tables can contain various objects that allegorically relate to a person's life. These paintings may be intended to evoke an emotional response from the viewer. For Muñoz, a table and its objects can represent the whole world or a reality, the many possible shapes and configurations representing the vicissitudes of life. Muñoz often succeeds in matching elements that seem to come from contrasting worlds and different values, while continuing to complement each other.