JOAN MIRÓ

This presentation combines paintings, sculptures, works on paper as well as found objects, offering a rare glimpse into Miró’s artistic process and evolution, spanning from his early career masterpieces to his groundbreaking late bronze sculptures. Specially highlighted are his transgressive bronze sculptures from the 1970s and 80s, showcased as if in a museum alongside their plaster casts and the found objects which inspired them.

Miró’s late bronze sculptures, which are to be found in globally leading museums and public spaces, combine craftsmanship and the poetry of the objet trouvé, a Surrealist and Dada method of bringing new life to quotidian objects. Miró’s mastery of the objet trouvé is best described by his friend Joan Prats declaring, “When I find a stone, it’s a stone; when Miró picks up a stone, it’s a Miró.”

The Surrealist origins of Miro are best represented by a large-scale early 20th century masterpiece entitled Painting (The Circus Horse), 1925 (114 x 146cm), which prefigures by decades Abstract Expressionist action painting and the modernist monochrome.

“The life and work of Joan Miró are full of objets trouvés, for in every object, every bird, every stone, every piece of driftwood on the beach, every cloud drawn on the sky—even if clouds and birds are harder to grasp and bring down to earth—he had the ability to see as many things, forms and nuances as were there for him to bring to light. The objet trouvé is the inspiration which suddenly springs up in the presence of the lucky find, glimpsing creative promise in the object which may or may not be fulfilled later.”

—Joan Punyet Miró