JOAN MIRO

View Joan Miró Prints Available at Shapero Modern

Joan Miró (1893 – 1983) was born in 1893, growing up in the Barri Gotic neighbourhood in Barcelona. Miró began drawing classes at the age of seven in Carrer del Regomer and enrolled at the fine art academy at La Llotja in 1907. He studied at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc. He held his first solo show in 1918 at the Galeries Dalmau. Inspired by Fauve and Cubist exhibitions in France, Miró was drawn to Montparnasse and the burgeoning arts community gathering there and moved to Paris in 1920 to immerse himself in the Parisian art scene.

In 1921, Joseph Dalmau aided Miró’s first Parisian solo exhibition, at Galerie La Licorne. In 1924, Miró joined the Surrealist group. Miró’s natural interest in symbolism flourished under the Surerralist influence, and he began to experiment, subverting traditional framing expectations and using the contradictions and dualities of his artistic process to his advantage rather than a hindrance. Miró’s paintings from this period have been dubbed his “dream series” for his blurring of sensical subjects and bold pigments. Miró never ventured so far as to abandon subject matter entirely in imitation of his surrealist contemporaries, instead of maintaining a unique symbolic, schematic language whilst employing the more typically Surrealist automatisation.

Miró returned to a more representational technique in 1928 and joined the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1931. They continued to represent Miró’s work until his death in 1983. Throughout the 1960s, Miró was a frequent feature artist in shows assembled by the Maeght Foundation. There were several large retrospectives honouring Miró in the 1970s taking place worldwide in New York (1972), London (1972), Saint-Paul-de-Vence (1973) and Paris (1974). His international reputation rose throughout his career, and several retrospectives sprung up in the years following his death. Madrid held the first full exhibition of his painting and graphic work at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 1978, and the same year, which marked the hundredth anniversary of his birth, saw Fundació Joan Miró, MoMa and Galerie Lelong hold similar tributary exhibitions.

Miró is collected worldwide, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía loans their collection regularly for exhibitions worldwide, including the Mcnay Art Museum and Denvert Art Museum launched Joan Miró: Instinct and Imagination over 2015 - 2016, and in 2019, when the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) launched Joan Miró: Birth of the World.