One of Joan Miro’s main wishes was to free Western art from the mimetic depiction of reality and to restore to it the sacred character it had had at the dawn of civilization. This left him to eliminate from his work pictorial devices such as scale, perspective, and chiaroscuro and instead to give drawing a pre-eminent role. Nevertheless, it was not until the Spanish Civil War that Miro established, in response to an urge to escape from the tragic situation of the times a language of signs and symbols of his own that would distinguish him from other artists of the twentieth century.
It’s a kind of secret language, made up of a formula of spells, and which predates words, time or what humans imagined, sensed, was truer, more real than what they could see was their sole reality.
Based on a selection of works from the collection of the Fundacip Joan Miro, this exhibition shows the evolution in Miro’s language, from the crystallization of the sign and its representation as an ideogram to the creation of large figures of mythical appearance, the result of the individualization and enlargement of disowned symbols. In his final years, Miro’s vocabulary was made up of women, sexes, birds, ladders, stars, and constellations, that coexisted alongside brutal and forthright gestures demonstrating the artist’s urge to assert himself.
(Photos by A&F Staff, with permission))
