SAO PAULO.- The Fundació Joan Miró organizes in Brazil the exhibition Joan Miró. A força da matéria, a show that brings together a total of 114 works by the artist.

Joan Miró. A força da matéria highlights the will of Miró of reaching the purity of art by exploring beyond conventional painting. The show illustrates the constant experimentation with techniques, media and different procedures that led him to the development of a new culture of matter.

Under the direction of Rosa Maria Malet, the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona organizes this exhibition, which has sixty-six works from its collection. The show includes paintings, drawings, sculptures and graphic works made between 1931 and 1981.

This is the first exhibition that the Fundació Joan Miró organizes in Brazil, and is open from May 24 to August 16 at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo, and September 2 to November 14 at MASC – Museu de Arte Santa Catarina, in Florianópolis.

"Matter, the instrument gives me the technique, a means to give life to one thing [...] In my painting, a small line with a thick shape at the end is a surprise. I'm as surprised [...] More than the picture itself, what counts is what brings out into the air, what diffuses." With these words, collected by Yvon Taillandier in an interview in 1959 at Xxe Siècle, Joan Miró reflects on the importance of experimentation with matter in his work and on the freedom and its creation effects in various media.

Joan Miró. A força da matéria includes a broad representation of this experimentation with matter, through 114 works of their funds and their private collections, presented in four rooms. In the first one, paintings and drawings from 1931 and 1944 are exhibited, most of which produced under the influence of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Thus, these works synthesize the tragedy of this period and show the new symbolic language that Miró configured.

The move of Joan Miró in 1956 to Palma de Mallorca, where his friend, the architect Josep Lluís Sert, had designed a studio, is the starting point of the exhibits in the second room. The paintings of this space show how Miró, with the desire to reach an increasingly anonymous artistic expression, releases his gesture. At maturity of his career, a continuing interest in matter and its possibilities lead him to work with profusion bronze sculpture, also represented in this room. Miró uses the lost-wax process to give life to new beings by the assembly of objects, mainly from natural and popular environment.

The third room presents a series of works of the seventies in which Miró continued questioning the ultimate meaning of the painting without ever leaving it. With the intention of removing all illusory elements of his painting, he underwent it to the most unorthodox practices -for example, boring the canvases- while uses or reuses the most unusual medias, wood, sandpaper, paintings pompier style, etc. Destroying and creating both, the artist provokes the viewer and questions the economic value of the artwork.

The last section of the exhibition focuses on the sculptural and graphic works of Miró, modalities with immense technical possibilities enhanced by collaborative work with artisans. In this room are remarkable his works with carborundum -an artificial abrasive made from powder of carbon and silicon-, that alows him to enrich the matter and enhance the line of the engravings. In each of these disciplines, Joan Miró challenges the technique seeking the freedom of expression that he achieved with painting.

Joan Miró. A força da matéria is the first exhibition organized by the Fundació Joan Miró in Brazil and has the support of the Brazilian subsidiary of Abertis, Arteris, responsible for the administration of more than 3,200 km of highways in the country. The Instituto Tomie Ohtake, opened in November 2001, covers an area of 7,500m2 in São Paulo dedicated to presenting the latest artistic trends. From May 24 to August 16, the exhibition will be open at this venue, and September 2 to November 14, at MASC – Museu de Arte de Santa Catarina, in Florianópolis.