MADRID.- The creative process of Joan Miró (Barcelona, 1893) throughout his career can be read through his relationship with objects, from his earliest paintings to his bronze sculptures, by way of his collages and assemblages. Miró and the Object allows visitors to discover the artist who defied painting and – precisely through his dialogue with the object – helped to bringing about a major change in the conception of art.

The exhibition is based on Miró’s enduring fascination with objects, which led him to find and collect elements of the most diverse nature in order to generate a particular creative atmosphere in his studio. Like the Dadaists and the Surrealists, Miró was open to the unexpected, and his intrinsic poetic sensibility led him to find a source of inspiration in these chance discoveries.

Miró and the Object is structured into six themed areas that explore the artist’s initial evolution from the pictorial representation of the object to its physical incorporation in the painting through techniques such as collage and assemblage, a process that was in many respects a direct challenge to the visual arts in the late twenties.

The exhibition shows how Miró gradually introduced more heterodox and anti-artistic materials into his work over the following decade, to the point of approaching the painting itself as an object. It was a transformation that reflected his profound crisis in relation to conventional painting, and placed the object at the very centre of a new poetic approach. This tendency culminated with Miró’s foray into ceramics and sculpture after the Spanish Civil War and World War II.

In this regard, Jeffett says: “Miró first explored the idea of anti-painting in 1930, in a series of paintings in which he carefully calculated a composition and then cancelled it out by crossing out the image. […] In 1974 Miró did a series of burnt paintings for his great retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. At the same time, he proposed a series of bronze sculptures, also made out of assemblages of objects, ceramics, and tapestries, as poetic modes beyond painting.” It was new, radical, and challenging work that confirmed Miró’s status as a dynamic, innovative creator. He was 81 years old.

The exhibition is rounded off with two series of photographs taken in the sixties by Claude Gaspari and Planas Montaña that document Miró’s working process with objects. Visitors will also be able to view two supporting film documents: a 1939 excerpt of Bizet’s ballet Jeux d’enfants, and a documentary on Miró’s burnt paintings by Francesc Català-Roca. Lastly, a video explaining the main theses behind the exhibition project has been produced for the occasion, with the participation of the curator William Jeffett, Miró’s grandson Joan Punyet Miró, ceramicist Josep Llorens Artigas, and Rosa Maria Malet, Director of the Fundació Joan Miró. The video can be viewed in the third section of the exhibition.

The selection includes the painting The toys (1924), from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Still life I (The Stalk of wheat) and Still life II (The carbide lamp), two paintings from 1922-1923 belonging to MoMA, and the assembled objects from the small, delicate series that Miró produced in 1931. Notable works from his mature period include Cadre-objet [Painting-Object, 1972] and Les oiseaux de proie foncent sur nos ombres [The birds of prey swoop down on our shadows, 1970], an oil on cowhide.

The project is complemented by a publication that includes testimonial, interpretative and critical texts by the curator William Jeffett, the artist Perejaume, Miró’s grandson Joan Punyet Miró, and Didier Ottinger, Chief Curator at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.