Oscar Muñoz: Hasselblad Award 2018

This catalog accompanies the exhibition mounted at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg after Oscar Muñoz received the 2018 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. It stands as one of the fullest surveys of an artist who treats the photograph less as a fixed record than as a fragile, disappearing event.

Across 180 pages the book reproduces the sculptural installations, drawings, and photographic works shown in Gothenburg, pieces built from water, breath, charcoal, and light-sensitive material rather than conventional prints. Essays by curators Louise Wolthers and Dragana Vujanović Östlind sit alongside a text by juror and Autograph ABP director Mark Sealy. Together they trace how Muñoz's experiments with evaporation, condensation, and combustion turn the picture into a process rather than an object, one always on the verge of vanishing.

Muñoz (b. 1951, Popayán, Colombia) has spent more than three decades probing memory, mortality, and the unreliability of images, work held by MoMA, Tate Modern, LACMA, and the Daros Latinamerica Collection. A retrospective traveled to the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2014. Pieces like Aliento and Narcisos secos, in which breath or water momentarily conjure a face before it fades, remain among his best-known works.