Collection: Miró Joan

(Barcelona 1893 - Palma de Mallorca 1983)

A Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist, Joan Miró was a leading figure of Surrealism, perhaps the most enigmatic artist of the movement. Despite this, he was always enormously successful, because his works have the curious ability to bring a smile to the viewer’s face, thanks to their bright, cheerful colors, strange, unreal figures, and especially his marks, which at first glance may look like children’s scribbles. The serenity of his work is so powerful that it encourages viewers to accept his expression even without fully understanding its meaning: Miró seems to speak directly to the unconscious, to the deepest emotions.
He grew up between Barcelona and his family’s country house in Montroig, a place that profoundly influenced his imagination. From 1912 to 1915, he attended Francisco Galí’s Academy in Barcelona, where he was taught to draw by first touching objects with his eyes closed: an avant-garde academy where he became familiar with the paintings of Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, the Fauves, and the Cubists. In 1924, he joined the Surrealist group, and twenty years later he took part in the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris. From 1925 to 1927, his paintings became dreamlike and bare, as if freed from the force of gravity and drawn toward the stars.