Manu Muñoz has built a career marked by experimentation, but also by a progressive refinement of the image. From his earliest work with graffiti and mural painting in the early 1990s, one essential idea has remained: the image must have an immediate impact, but it must also sustain a second look. What once had to assert itself quickly in the street has, over time, evolved into a form of painting capable of concentrating ever greater meaning into fewer elements.

Throughout his career, Manu Muñoz has brought together oil, enamel, spray paint, figuration, and abstract gesture in compositions where contemporary, ancestral, and symbolic references coexist. Human figures, animals, and organic forms appear suspended in spaces that are difficult to locate, as though they belonged simultaneously to different times. This indeterminacy does not eliminate narrative, but shifts it towards a more open territory, where the recognisable and the undefined can coexist without needing to be resolved.

Throughout this evolution, emptiness has acquired increasing importance. Manu Muñoz has gradually reduced the number of elements, freed up space, and concentrated the symbolic power of what remains. Simplification does not entail a loss of content. On the contrary, each figure, each fragment of colour, and each gesture takes on greater weight within the composition. Rather than accumulating information, the painting begins to select what it considers essential.

Icons of Waiting, the new series presented in this exhibition, emerges precisely from this process of synthesis. Manu Muñoz continues to work through narrative, but now does so through subtraction. The starting point remains a specific story, although its circumstances are progressively stripped away, shifting the portrait from individual identity towards a broader state. It is less about representing someone than about capturing a human experience.

People waiting patiently, bodies that conceal themselves, gazes turned away, or women embodying forms of motherhood without being biological mothers create an intimate imaginary that ultimately takes on a collective dimension. Each painting retains the trace of a particular experience, while shedding anything that might confine it to a specific biography. The figure thus approaches the icon, understood not as a fixed image, but as a presence capable of condensing something shared.

Waiting occupies a particularly significant place within this process. To wait is to inhabit an interval, to remain within a period of time whose outcome is still unknown. Very little happens explicitly in these works, and yet this stillness contains a constant tension. Action is suspended, forcing the gaze towards what would normally remain in the background: a posture, a gesture, a distance, a silence.

This suspension connects with an investigation that has been present in Manu Muñoz’s work for years. The coexistence of contemporary approaches and ancestral references, of recognisable figuration and abstract gesture, has allowed Manu Muñoz to construct images that seem to escape any specific temporality. In Icons of Waiting, this exploration reaches a more restrained formulation. Time is no longer neutralised solely through the combination of different visual languages, but also through the reduction of action.

Within 10 Years. 10 Artists. 10 Stories., this new series allows us to trace Manu Muñoz’s trajectory through both what has remained and what has progressively disappeared. After almost three decades of exploration, his evolution does not lead towards an image that appears more complex, but towards one that is more precise in its capacity to convey meaning.

In Icons of Waiting, Manu Muñoz takes this logic to a point of particular concentration. The painting reduces what is visible without reducing the narrative. And ultimately transforms waiting into a way of looking.