Zilberman is hosting Larry Muñoz’s first solo exhibition in Istanbul, Graceful Elegant Beasts, at its main venue in Mısır Apartment, Beyoğlu, until July 26.
Presenting his first solo show in Istanbul, Zilberman offers Larry Muñoz’s Graceful Elegant Beasts to viewers at its main venue in Mısır Apartment, Beyoğlu.
At the heart of Larry Muñoz’s practice—which seeks to reveal a narrative extending beyond time and space through the memories carried by found materials—is a meticulous attention to detail. Muñoz focuses on the fragments of meaning hidden in the surface, gesture, or form of objects. Over the years, he has collected materials and developed a conceptual journey reflecting on the contradictions and tensions among these objects and ideas, which he approaches through three layers.
Graceful evokes divine and mysterious forces shaping the universe; Elegant refers to a harmonious and refined sense of beauty defined by human aesthetic judgments. Beasts serves as a kind of self-portrait reflecting the individual’s own moral and physical judgments, representing elements that society deems wrong or unfamiliar.
Drawing inspiration from encounters with abandoned, deteriorated, and dysfunctional elements, Muñoz creates a constellation composed of videos, photographs, and installations. By assembling different fragments, he reinterprets depleted materials, industrial and organic remnants, not merely for their functions but also for the potential they hold within new wholes. Muñoz gathers objects found during urban explorations, items bearing traces of the environment and history. Rather than repairing or idealizing them, he preserves their ambiguities, avoids imposing a single narrative, and places the viewer at the center of questioning the very boundaries of “what is exhibit-able.”
Graceful Elegant Beasts, shaped as a profound meditation on our relationship with objects and the exhibit-able, reveals a connection woven with fragility, admiration, and contradictions. It invites viewers to reconsider intertwined human and natural stories through the unique existences of materials themselves.
Calling for a rediscovery of the importance of shadows and reflections against the bright, white lights of contemporary art spaces, Muñoz gives new forms to abandoned objects. Graceful Elegant Beasts, which questions how objects influence our perception of space, brings together the mesmerizing chaos of nature with humanity’s quest for order. The artist conveys the tension between harmony and chaos, inviting the viewer into a space that is simultaneously familiar and unsettling.
