By Balasz Takac for Widewalls
The interwar period is saturated with artists active in different environments who have made quite a contribution to the further dissemination of modernism, one of them being Joan Miró. This Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist is often described as one of the leading artists of the 20th centurydue to the influence he made on the generations of artists and the legacy that still inspires.
Miró’s impeccable practice is about to be explored with an exhibition tracing his prolific creative output with seminal examples spanning 50 years.
The Miro Survey
The entire oeuvre of Joan Miró is hard to describe and can, therefore, be categorized as a hybrid one. The artist has flirted with Cubism, Surrealism, and abstraction, but he established a one-of-a-kind aesthetic that made him quite a non-conforming figure.
This particular exhibition curated by Dr. Javier Molins, in close conversation with the Miró family and Galerie Lelong Paris, tends to revisit more than five decades of the artist’s production with a fine selection of his paintings, drawings, and sculptures and drawings.
The Installment
After being dazzled by Surrealism, Miró started crafting his personal style for which he was eventually celebrated. Throughout the 1930s, this prolific artist developed striking imagery characterized by the appearance of colorful human figures juxtaposed against dim backgrounds which served as a comment on the social circumstances amid the Spanish Civil War.
Among the examples made during this period will be the paintingFemme nue (Naked Woman, 1931) and gouache called Figurations embryonnaires (Embryonic Figurations,1935). Miró found himself on the coast of Normandy, where he had fled from the German occupation of Paris. It here where, between 1940 to 1941, he produced twenty-three small works as part of the series Constellations. Around the same time, the artist received international fame with his first retrospective at MoMA in New York and influenced a generation of artists around the emerging Abstract Expressionism.
On display will also be a series of drawings from this period that illuminate the establishment of Miro’s painterly language, his quintessential forms such as circles of color, crescent moons, and human figures drawn with childlike strokes. The installment will end with works such as Souvenir de la Tour Eiffel (1977), Gymnaste (1977), or Le Pélerin (1972), as well as with an oil on paper from 1981.
Joan Miró at Maruani Mercier
By paying special attention to the production of Joan Miró, the gallery tends to reexamine his practice in the light of contemporary revaluations of the deeds of modernist masters and the ways they have affected the art world at the time.
The exhibition Joan Miró: Five Decades 1931 – 1981 will be on display at Maruani Mercier Gallery in Brussels from October 19th to December 23, 2021.
