Miquel Navarro, Sculptor of Cities Real and Imagined, Dies at 81
In this column honoring those we lost in the art community, we remember a leading Spanish sculptor, a Dutch museum leader, and an Indian modernist.
In Memoriam honors those we recently lost in the art world.
Miquel Navarro (1945–2026)
Spanish sculptor of imaginary cities
The Spanish artist's hometown, Mislata in Valencia, served as a lifelong inspiration for his City sculptures, large-scale installations that invite visitors to walk through hundreds of abstract geometric shapes as skyscrapers. Fittingly enough, his imaginary cities became part of real urban landscapes, in the form of public works in Spain and abroad.
He was one of the artists to represent Spain at the 1986 Venice Biennale, and received the Spanish Ministry of Culture's Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (National Award for Plastic Arts) that same year. His work is in the collections of the Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao, Museo Reina Sofía, Centre Pompidou, and more.
"Today Mislata loses one of its most beloved residents, a friend and a genius," Mislata Mayor and President of Fundació Miquel Navarro Carlos Fernández Bielsa said in a statement translated from Spanish, "a generous person and a world-renowned figure in sculpture, an irreplaceable creator."
Ursula von Rydingsvard (1942–2026)
Sculptor of monumental objects
Partially inspired by her childhood incarceration in post-World War II refugee camps, her enormous sculptures were whittled from massive cedar beams, including “Cedrus” (2016), an almost 20-foot-tall (~6 m) tornado made from 15,000 pounds (~6.8 t) of wood. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and more.
“She was like the sun," Courtney Childress, her studio manager, said in this statement. "She was this force that pulled people in and kept them orbiting around her.”
