The Soft Revolution: How Aurèlia Muñoz Reshaped Sculpture Beyond Stone, Steel and Certainty

Inside the cavernous galleries of MuseoReina Sofía, the air feels strangely alive. Suspended forms drift overhead like celestial organisms.

Knotted bodies hover between sculpture and apparition. Winged books seem poised to exhale. Vast woven structures pulse with the quiet force of something ancient yet startlingly futuristic.

Nothing sits still inside Aurèlia Muñoz. Beings. Not even the viewer’s understanding of what sculpture is supposed to be.

Running until 7 September 2026, the most ambitious retrospective ever mounted on the Catalan textile artist and sculptor Aurèlia Muñoz arrives not merely as an exhibition, but as a corrective.

Across more than 150 works — many never previously exhibited or rarely seen in museums — the show repositions Muñoz as one of the most radical sculptural thinkers of the twentieth century: a visionary who transformed fibre, thread, jute and paper into vessels of philosophical inquiry, emotional architecture and spatial poetry.

To walk through Beings is to witness sculpture shedding its armour.

For centuries, sculpture has been culturally tethered to permanence — marble, bronze, stone, steel. Weight. Solidity. Monumentality. Muñoz dismantled that mythology entirely.

Her materials were soft, tactile and traditionally dismissed as decorative, domestic or feminine. Yet in her hands, macramé became monumental.

Embroidery escaped the wall. Textile abandoned craft and entered the realm of intellectual and architectural discourse.

Long before contemporary art embraced fluid identities, ecological consciousness and interspecies thinking, Muñoz was already weaving them into existence.

The retrospective unfolds across six rooms inside the Nouvel Building, tracing five decades of experimentation beginning in the 1950s. Her early embroidered works from the 1960s read almost like rebellions against painting itself — stitched surfaces vibrating with dimensionality and movement.

Then come the astonishing macramé sculptures of the 1970s: towering, knotted entities that descend from ceilings like sacred organisms or futuristic totems. They do not occupy space passively. They alter it.

One of the exhibition’s great revelations is the scale of Muñoz’s ambition. These works were never conceived as isolated objects.

She frequently collaborated with Catalan architects so her sculptures could exist symbiotically within the environments they inhabited. To Muñoz, sculpture was alive — a “being” capable of dialogue with bodies, buildings, air and light.

That philosophy reaches its most mesmerising form in her Bird-Kites and Aérostatos series from the 1980s.

Inspired by origami, sailing and Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machines, these aerodynamic structures float through the galleries with astonishing lightness, blurring the boundaries between engineering, dreamscape and ritual object. They feel less constructed than summoned.

Equally hypnotic are her later paper-pulp works: delicate oceanic forms resembling jellyfish, algae and anemones preserved within transparent cases. They reveal an artist increasingly preoccupied with fragility, ecology and transcendence — concerns that resonate uncannily in today’s fractured world.

Curators Manuel Cirauqui and Rosa Lleó approach the retrospective not as an act of nostalgia, but excavation. Cirauqui has spoken of “removing the typecasting” historically imposed upon Muñoz — the limiting tendency to reduce textile art to craft rather than recognising its conceptual and sculptural force.

Lleó, meanwhile, describes the exhibition as “unprecedented”, particularly in its inclusion of archival materials revealing the artist’s intensely methodical creative process.

That archival dimension proves essential. Sketches, letters, maquettes and notebooks expose Muñoz not simply as an intuitive maker, but as a rigorous intellectual constructing entire cosmologies through fibre.

And what extraordinary cosmologies they are.

The title Beings points toward one of the exhibition’s most compelling ideas: the notion of an “Aurèlian cosmology” populated by genderless, plural entities existing between human, animal and myth. These forms resist binaries. They refuse categorisation.

Decades before contemporary discourse caught up, Muñoz was imagining identities as fluid, interspecies and perpetually transforming.

This makes the retrospective feel remarkably contemporary rather than historical.

There is also something profoundly moving about experiencing this exhibition inside Museo Reina Sofía itself — an institution increasingly committed to redefining what a twenty-first-century museum can be.

Rather than functioning as a passive “museum for the eye”, the Reina Sofía positions art as a living social and intellectual force capable of transformation, radical imagination and embodied experience. Muñoz’s work fits that mission perfectly because it demands to be felt physically as much as understood intellectually.

The exhibition ultimately leaves behind a quietly radical proposition: softness is not weakness. Fibre is not secondary. Thread can carry as much conceptual weight as marble ever did.

And perhaps that is Muñoz’s greatest triumph.

She did not merely expand sculpture’s vocabulary. She liberated it entirely.

For tickets and more information on the exhibition, visit https://www.museoreinasofia.es/ today.

*Photos courtesy of Museo Reina Sofía.