Miquel Navarro, Sculptor of Imaginary Cities, Dies at 81

Spanish sculptor Miquel Navarro, whose large-scale City installations let visitors walk through hundreds of abstract geometric skyscrapers, has died at 81. He was 1945-born and died in 2026, according to Hyperallergic's In Memoriam notice.

Navarro built his career on a single, lifelong source: Mislata, his hometown in Valencia. The working-class municipality supplied the visual grammar for his City sculptures — installations assembled from hundreds of abstract geometric forms that read as towers, skyscrapers and streets. Visitors move through them on foot.

From imaginary cities to real ones

The fiction crossed into reality. Navarro's invented cities entered actual urban landscapes as public works installed in Spain and abroad, blurring the line between model and metropolis.

Recognition came early and at the highest institutional level. In 1986 alone, Navarro represented Spain at the Venice Biennale and received the Spanish Ministry of Culture's Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas, the National Award for Plastic Arts — two of the country's top honors in a single year.

His work entered permanent collections at:

• the Guggenheim Museum in New York
• the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
• the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid
• the Centre Pompidou in Paris

Mislata Mayor Carlos Fernández Bielsa, who also serves as president of the Fundació Miquel Navarro, announced the death in a municipal statement. "Today Mislata loses one of its most beloved residents, a friend and a genius," Fernández Bielsa said. He called Navarro "a generous person and a world-renowned figure in sculpture, an irreplaceable creator."

The foundation bearing the artist's name, anchored in the town that shaped him, now carries the legacy of an oeuvre that turned one municipality's skyline into an international sculptural language.

Ursula von Rydingsvard dies at 84

The same notice records a second loss: Ursula von Rydingsvard, the sculptor of monumental cedar objects, born in 1942 and died in 2026 at 84.

Her enormous sculptures were whittled from massive cedar beams. The work drew in part on her childhood, which she spent incarcerated in post-World War II refugee camps. That history fed forms of survival, weight and shelter at architectural scale.

The numbers define the ambition. "Cedrus" (2016) stands almost 20 feet tall — roughly six meters — and contains 15,000 pounds, about 6.8 metric tons, of wood. One sculpture consumed enough cedar to fill a small truck.

Her work is held by:

• the Metropolitan Museum of Art
• the Museum of Modern Art
• the Whitney Museum of American Art

Courtney Childress, her studio manager, delivered the most personal tribute. "She was like the sun," Childress said. "She was this force that pulled people in and kept them orbiting around her."

Two sculptors who worked at monumental scale — one inventing cities from geometry, one carving weather into cedar — have left public and museum collections on two continents as their lasting infrastructure.