The outstanding textile artist Aurèlia Muñoz was associated with the Nouvelle Tapisserie (also known as Fiber Art) movement during the second half of the twentieth century. Somehow – incomprehensibly – she has been missing from Spanish museums, although the New York MoMA’s 2020 acquisition of three of her pieces for its permanent collection sparked renewed interest in her work.
On numerous occasions, A. Muñoz recalled the importance of her early education at the Institut Montserrat, Barcelona’s first Montessori school, where she learned to work with her hands. Later on, she attended the Escola Massana – Centre d’Art i Disseny, one of the city’s leading art schools, where she trained in various techniques. This explains the centrality of manual skills in all her practice: she insisted on taking charge of the entire productive process herself, without resorting to a team. She started with a preliminary study, from which she made a cartoon, using this to make an outline, dye her materials, weave them together and assemble them.

After taking up embroidery to produce work such as Personajes místicos y cruz [Mystical figures and a cross, 1964], in the mid-1960s she discovered macramé, a knotting technique that was to play a major role in her practice. After an experiment in making a voluminous macramé knot in 1969, she took a leap into three dimensions with pieces that created spaces suggesting the concepts of protection and shelter. During this period, she made Homenaje a Gaudí [Homage to Gaudi, 1969], a hanging sphere resembling orange segments. Later, her work took a monumental turn, with pieces like Ente social [Social entity, 1976].
In the following decade, A. Muñoz went deeper into this line of reflection, giving special attention to the materials and volumes of her work. Her tapestries abandoned walls to embrace architectonic functions, entering into dialogue with space. In this way, she presented them as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk that blurred the lines between the fine arts and crafts, and muted the hierarchy between techniques and materials. Consequently, her work is usually categorised as being at the confluence of tapestry, sculpture and architecture; it discarded the “functionality” attributed to the decorative arts, making them an autonomous medium of expression. Using natural fibres such as hemp, wool and sisal, and her profound knowledge of folk techniques and wisdom concerning textiles, A. Muñoz infused her pieces with meaning, linking them with an ancestral and organic universe in dialogue with the natural world.

During her lifetime, this Catalan artist enjoyed widespread renown in Spain and internationally, accumulating many honours from the beginning of her career onwards. Her work appeared in leading biennials (for example, Lausanne and São Paulo), and the main international bibliography of textile art includes an entry on her work signalling her status as a reference in the field. Her production is held by museums including the MoMA (New York), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the National Museum of Scotland (Edinburgh), the Umêleckopruumyslové Museum (Prague) and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid). The exhibition Anudar el espacio. Donación Aurèlia Muñoz at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (Barcelona) in 2019 marked the beginning of a reconsideration of her career in her native country.