![]() Falling in a period of intense creative mingling of whimsy with the grotesque, these prints characterize an important juncture in Miró's career. These lithographs were executed shortly after finishing the famous constellation series of paintings (called by one critic the most intricate, most elaborately developed of all Miró's compositions), right around the time his mother died and he fired his first ceramics in collaboration with Artigas. Miró hallucinates on stone for these prints, filling them with monstrous beasts and one-eyed aliens adrift in a heaven of moons and stars and black nebulae, floating breasts and generative organs. The 40 plates reproduced here sample the pith of his lithographic production - a series produced in 1944, full of the eerie images and droll distortion he had sought on canvas for decades.It's never easy for me to talk about my painting, wrote Miró, since it is always born in a state of hallucination induced by some kind of shock, objective or subjective, for which I am not personally responsible in the least. The lithographic print medium suited and encouraged the artist's lifelong, often radical, obsession with stripping art to the marrow. MiróMiró's line recalls Picasso's in clarity and power the Catalan's plastic aggressiveness led him, as it did his Andalusian friend, to bold, successful experiment and innovation in ceramics, sculpture and printmaking, especially lithography. As regards my means of expression, I try my hardest to achieve the maximum of clarity, power, and plastic aggressiveness a physical sensation to begin with, followed up by an impact on the psyche. In 2011 Tate Modern in London held a retrospective of his work which travelled on to Fundació Joan Miró and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.Paperback. In 1993, a hundred years after his birth, major exhibitions were held in the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Because of political upheaval the first full exhibition of his painting and limited editions did not take place in his homeland until the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 1978. In 1964 Joan Miró was honored with two retrospectives in London at the Tate Gallery and the ICA. Enormously influential throughout his life, Miró’s biomorphic forms were always thrillingly inventive and he will be remembered as having had a profound influence on Modern Art. He died in 1983 having just completed Woman and Bird a public sculpture in Barcelona. In the 1950s he began working on a much larger scale and participated in the “Homage to Surrealism” exhibition alongside Salvador Dalí. Joan Miro was prolific throughout his life and worked extensively in lithography, murals, tapestries, and public sculpture. In 1940 he narrowly avoided the invading Nazis when fleeing from Paris to Palma de Mallorca after which his canvases took on an increasingly brutal and unnerving quality. In the 1930s and 40s Miró had an increasingly political outlook and he produced numerous work against the Franco regime in Spain. He was, for instance, a huge influence on Pollock and Rothko. His radical style was a considerable contribution to the 20 th century’s avant-garde allowing for the later embrace of complete abstraction. Through meticulous and careful planning, Joan Miró managed to harness the spontaneous feel and energy of his work into something recognizable and even representational-regardless of their level of abstraction. It is thought that Miró illustrated over 250 Livre d’Artiste, which are now highly collectable and cherished around the world. First thought of as a Fauvist, it was his loose participation in the Surrealist group in the early 1920s and his move to Paris that his naturally poetic and dreamlike works began to flourish. He pioneered the use of automatic drawing and saw it as a means of shaking off established techniques that he associated with bourgeois art-an art form he detested bitterly. ![]() ![]() He is renowned for having an astonishing ability to combine everyday identifiable forms-such as the moon-with intricately rendered objects straight from his imagination.īorn in 1883 in Barcelona, Joan Miró initially went into business until a nervous breakdown forced him to embrace his artistic flair. His fierce experimentation combined with his natural elusiveness kept him from becoming too aligned with any artist movement despite having affinities with Surrealism and Abstractionism. An artist of huge international reach, the works of Joan Miró are considered joyful re-creations of childlike fantasy and are heavily identified with Catalonia where he was born.
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