When Miró discovered the play "Ubu Roi" written by Alfred Jarry, he was immediately won over by its burlesque and derisory tone. He quickly appropriated the character of Ubu and illustrated the text in the 1950s. Miró went so far as to invent several other stories featuring Ubu: "Ubu in the Balearic Islands" (1971) and "The Childhood of Ubu" (1975). He imagined the two works in their entirety, writing the text and illustrating it. Widely acclaimed, "Ubu Roi" by Alfred Jarry is considered a precursor text of the surrealist movement, which Miró will join.

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Joan Miró is regarded as an innovator in the Surrealist movement, rendering the subconscious and bringing it to life in an abstract style that is instantly recognisable. This concept would later inspire Abstract Expressionists in the early 20th century. Often driven by interior emotions, spontaneity and gesture inform his works, resulting in less calculated, "freer" works. Working in a limited colour palette, Miró worked across sculpture, ceramics, works on paper, and painting.

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.

By this time, Miró had consolidated a painterly language of his own, integrating the whole picture space into a single surface in which form and content are fused. Miró started using black through his experience as a printmaker and he applied it in his work as a new form of expression. It also comes from the Chinese calligraphy Miró so much admired. Miró himself explained, “I have exercised my tendency to strip away, to simplify, in three areas: modeling, colors, and figuration of the characters”.

The artist was featured in major retrospectives that took place at MoMa in 1941, the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in 1962, and the Grand Palais, Paris, in 1974 and 2019. His work is featured in top collections around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Art Institute of Chicago, Reina Sofia Madrid, and many more. Miró recently had a major retrospective at the Beaux-Arts Museum in Mons, Belgium.