Bilbao (EFE).- The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao shows the works made by the Catalan artist Joan Miró during his stays in Paris between 1920 and 1945.
It was a “fundamental” period in his work in which he would cement the sign language that would give him prestige and international recognition.
The temporary exhibition, entitled «Joan Miró. The absolute reality. Paris, 1920-1945» and which can be visited until May 28, opens the 2023 season of the Guggenheim Bilbao.
The season will be completed with another seven exhibitions dedicated to artists of the stature of Kokoschka, Picasso and the Japanese Yayoi Kusama, among others.
The Miró exhibition brings together around 82 works produced between 1920 and 1945, when he traveled several times to Paris, a “fundamental” city and period in Miró’s life and artistic work.
This is what the director general of the Guggenheim Bilbao, Juan Ignacio Vidarte, said at the presentation of the exhibition to the media.
Vidarte has also highlighted that Miró is a “fundamental” artist in the collections of the North American Foundation and whose work had been exhibited in collective exhibitions held before in Bilbao but to whom a solo exhibition had never been dedicated in the Biscayan capital.
Paris, essential stage
The curator of the exhibition, Enrique Juncosa, a scholar of Miró’s work, has also highlighted the importance of the artistic period covered by the Bilbao exhibition, since it is when “the language of signs that would shape the pictorial style emerged and was consolidated. so personal of the Catalan artist».
Juncosa recalled that, around 1915, Miró “already had interesting work” and although he was very interested in Cubism and Fauvism, he worked mainly on portraits, still lifes and landscapes.
Once in Paris, around 1923-24, his pictorial language already changed from what had been called “magical realism” to what were later called “dream paintings”.
This shift, which represented a “very radical” transformation in what had been his work until then, was influenced by his relationship with the “very radical” poetry that was being made in France at that time and by books that spoke of the logic of Primitive man and Freudian theories about dreams and their interpretations.
dream paintings
The Bilbao exhibition has managed to bring together “a very large group of these ‘dreamlike’ works, since they were fundamental for the history of modern art and also for the career of Joan Miró,” Juncosa highlighted.
«It was a particularly prolific moment in his work, since, throughout his career, which he did between Montroig, Paris, Barcelona and Mallorca, there were times when he painted a lot and others when he painted less».
The works he produced in the 1920s refer to the world of “visions, dreams and even hallucinations that, he later said, caused him to fast for long periods of time.”
The 30’s and 40’s
«In the 1930s, when he painted less, his work became more expressionist, the characters were more monstrous, and it was when he did the paintings on masonite that were very aggressive paintings in which he used very radical materials such as tar, sand, etc.
“In this way, this exhibition shows the entire evolution of Miró’s work, from the beginning until it reaches the sign language at the end,” he explained.
«Miró painted his constellations in the 1940s and 1941s and then spent some time without painting until he reached his works from the mid-40s, which are more similar to those that would later provide him with a personal and recognizable stamp and which are the ones that come to mind when we think of a Miró”, he concluded. EFE