Joan Miró
Featuring a special performance by the artist’s grandson Joan Punyet Miró: Je veux m’en aller en disant merde à tout
Exhibition dates: October 3, 2015 – January 30, 2016
Galerie Gmurzynska is delighted to commence the fall season with a comprehensive showcase by one of the unequaled frontrunners of the historical avant-garde: Joan Miró.
The focus of this unique survey is the multifaceted body of work Miró created in Paris in the circle of surrealist mastermind André Breton as well as in Barcelona; in the artist’s beloved native Catalan countryside; and on the island of Majorca, spanning several periods from the mid-1920s all the way to the late yet continuously explorative works in a staggering breadth of media from the 1970s.
The exhibition comprises early, radically abstract-surrealist museum-works such as the 1925 “Circus Horse” or the beautifully-hued 1927 “Peinture” – paintings that form one of the foremost series of Miró’s oneiric oeuvre, exemplars of which today are held in major collections in Europe and the US.
The exhibition will further include rarely seen mixed-media works the artist created using unconventional materials and techniques, ingeniously fashioned into the stimulating and thought-provoking “Collage-Drawings” of the 1930s. These betray Miró’s pioneering blend of personal imagination and mass-culture imagery, of which related works were previously the subject of a special showcase at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
A further highlight will be a suite of large drawings picturing fantastic biomorphic interpretations on the female figure and on the theme of lovers, intriguing elaborations that evolved from a sketchbook Miró composed while holidaying with his young bride Pilar Joncosa on Majorca in 1930.
Rounding out the selection, a distinct group of Miró’s commanding anthropomorphic bronze sculptures from the 1960s to 1970s will be on view. This includes the intricately textured “Femme” from 1968, an exclusive edition Miró specially conceived for the Fundacio Joan Miró in Barcelona and for the preeminent collectors and patrons Aimé and Marguerite Maeght’s eponymous Fondation in Saint-Paul de Vence.
This survey presents a wonderful occasion to view these distinct bodies of work from the formative working periods of Miró in a carefully curated showcase, while giving insight into the artistic concerns and methodologies employed by this Modern Master at a time of significant political and social transformations defining the pre-, inter- and postwar years in Western Europe.
A fully illustrated catalogue including previously unpublished archival photographs, has been conceived in close collaboration with the artist’s grandson, Joan Punyet Miró. A distinguished scholar, Punyet Miró has edited select volumes of the catalogue raisonné while contributing to numerous museum exhibits on Miró over the last decade. Galerie Gmurzynska is grateful to draw on his expertise on this occasion, by presenting his newly written texts on selected works featured in this exhibition.
The publication further includes an essay by the acclaimed art historian Joachim Pissarro – formerly the Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and currently Professor of Art History at Hunter College, City University of New York.