About the artists

Gavin Bryars first came to be recognised in professional music realms as a jazz bassist working in the early sixties with improvisers Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley. He subsequently collaborated with John Cage and Cornelius Cardew and was instrumental in founding the legendary Portsmouth Sinfonia. Bryars’ first major works as a composer were the indeterminist work The Sinking of the Titanic in 1969 and Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet in 1971; the former appeared on Brian Eno's Obscure Records in 1975 and remixed by Aphex Twin as Raising the Titanic in 1994 and the latter was rerecorded in the 90s with Tom Waits. His first opera Medea was staged by Robert Wilson in Lyon in 1984 and his second opera Doctor Ox’s Experiment by Atom Egoyan in London in 1998. Bryars has collaborated with many artists and choreographers including Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe and Christian Boltanski.

Juan Muñoz was an artist from Madrid, raised under the Franco regime. He studied at the Croydon School of Art and at the Central School of Art and Design in London before travelling to New York on a Fulbright scholarship, where he worked assisting sculptor Mario Merz. Although also working in performance and audio, he is most known for his figurative works and large scale installations with which he explored size and space; notably Double Bind, the second Unilever commission for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall and The Wasteland, which inspired a scene in David Lynch's Twin Peaks. Showing early on in his career at London's ICA and the Lisson Gallery, Muñoz went on to exhibit internationally in his lifetime. Since his death, there have been major retrospective exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Tate Modern, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.