BRUSSELS.- One of the twentieth century’s most celebrated artists, Joan Miró’s magical universe is explored in this intimate exhibition spanning 50 years of creative production in a journey that begins with a painting from 1931 and ends with a work on paper from 1981, enabling us to chart how his work evolved over the decades.

Joan Miró (Barcelona, 1893 – Palma de Mallorca, 1983) is one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated artists, whose influence and legacy continues to be ever-present in our times today. Painter, sculptor and ceramicist, his lifelong playful flirtation with abstraction and figuration have secured his place in the pantheon of art history.

Avoiding categorisation, neither cubist, surrealist nor abstract artist, this exhibition aims to take a journey through more than 50 years of the artist’s creative production. The tour begins in 1931, with a small figurative painting in which one can identify the beginning of that unique visual language characteristic of Miró. It ends in 1981 with a oil on paper that presents his popular style. Spanning a combined total of 32 works, the exhibition features iconic pieces, including Souvenir de la Tour Eiffel (1977), Gymnaste (1977) or Le Pélerin (1972).

The exhibition features his paintings, sculptures and drawings, presenting the progression of his style as he honed in on his artistic voice. This survey show is an intimate walk-through Miró’s colourful career.

Maruani Mercier Gallery brings this important exhibition curated by Dr. Javier Molins in close conversation with the Miró family and Galerie Lelong Paris.

THE THIRTIES AND FORTIES

After his brief Surrealist experience of the twenties, Miró set off on his solitary path by creating his personal visual language. During the 1930s, he invented an iconography of his own composed of highly stylised human figures on backgrounds with a predominance of dark colours, an ominous portent of the pre-war atmosphere that was to culminate in the Spanish Civil War.




One can see this process in the exhibited works such as the delicate painting entitled Femme nue [Naked Woman] (1931), which depicts the distorted figure of a woman on a dark grey background, or in the gouache entitled Figurations embryonnaires [Embryonic Figurations] (1935), that contains Miró’s characteristic little monsters that he grouped under the French term personnages.

The year 1941 marked a turning-point in Miró’s career. It saw his first retrospective at MoMA in New York, which decisively cemented his international prestige and influenced the generation of artists who were to create American Abstract Expressionism, including Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock.

It was in this period that Miró consolidated a painterly language of his own, integrating the whole picture space into a single surface in which form and content are fused. A series of drawings from this period are included here; in these works, quintessentially Mirónian themes can be detected, such as crescent moons, circles of colour and human figures drawn with childlike strokes, and the colour black begins to play a very prominent role.

THE FIFTIES

Miró started using black pigment through his experience as a printmaker and, discovering the power lent to his art for using this colour, he applied it in his work as a new form of expression. It also stemmed from Chinese calligraphy Miró so much admired. This black uniquely dominates three drawings dating from 1951, present in this exhibition, in which he uses exclusively this colour to represent his characters placed in a world devoid of a background or context. For, as Miró himself explained, “I have exercised my tendency to strip away, to simplify, in three areas: modeling, colors, and figuration of the characters”.

THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES

Miró had made occasional forays into sculpture in the twenties when he was involved in the Surrealist movement. Rather than create three-dimensional objects, however, his objective was to create a third dimension in the painting by hanging an object on the canvas. It was in the Sixties and Seventies that sculpture emerged as another artistic discipline in his wide-ranging repertoire, as we can see in the sculptures displayed in these rooms. Miró began by modelling ceramics and casting them in bronze and ended up giving new life to the objects that populated his studio. With these objects Miró constructed new figures, which he assembled and then cast in bronze, in many cases painting over them in a wide range of colours.

In the works on paper section, the exhibition closes with a series of drawings dating from the 60s, 70s and early 80s in which we find a mature Miró who has stripped away more and more elements, and which contain a series of graphic forms that are unmistakably his style. These drawings exhibit a predominance of black and of figures such as the crescent moon, which reappears frequently in his works.