Madrid exhibition seeks to highlight the lesser-known side of Joan Miró, the Catalan Surrealist who sidestepped labels in a long and celebrated career.

SPAIN - The Thyssen-Bornemissa Museum in Madrid on Tuesday opened an exhibition that aims to show the unknown side of one of Spain's most celebrated artists, Joan Miró. Most people can instantly recognise a Miró because of his characteristic use of multicoloured spots and lines reminiscent of children's drawings, and his work has been extensively used in advertising. For years, a Miró artwork with a sun-like shape and the word "España" underneath was the logo used by tourism authorities to sell Spain abroad.

However the show's curator Tomás Llorens wants to unveil a Miró whose work is less naïve-looking.  Miró: Tierra (Miró: Earth) explores the Catalan's fascination with the land and his passion for rural culture. The art on display explores the themes of fertility, sexuality, life, death and metamorphosis. Nearly 70 paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages and ceramics from several collections around the world - including the Guggenheim New York, the MoMa and the Georges Pompidou - make up an exhibition that will be "the biggest event of the season," according to the Thyssen's chief curator, Guillermo Solana.
"With this show, a Miró emerges that is different from everything we knew before,"  Solana adds.

The artist's grandson, Joan Punyet Miró, says he is delighted at the exhibition because his grandfather's life was devoted to the study of nature, and he lamented that his work "has fallen prey to tired clichés." Punyet, who was close to his grandfather during the last 15 years of Miró's life - he died on Christmas Day, 1983 - described him as "an iconoclast, a non-conformist and a transgressor." Llorens himself describes the Catalan artist as "a prime example of artistic and intellectual renewal and regeneration" in the wake of World War I.

The exhibition aims to depict Miró as the great precursor of Informalism and Abstract Expressionism. The art on display also evidences Miró's strong ties with Catalonia, its land, its people and traditions. The show is divided into seven categories that explore his passion for the rural lifestyle of Mont-Roig, his flirtation with the Paris avant-garde movements, his experimentation with polymorphism and his first attempts at sculpture and collages.

Born in Barcelona in 1893, Miró is considered one of the greatest exponents of Surrealism. After training in his home town and coming into contact with the French avant-garde through Francis Picabia, he moved to Paris in 1920, where he met Picasso and discovered his own artistic voice after prolonged contact with the Surrealists and Dadaists. Surrealism's founder, André Breton, once described him as "the most Surrealist of us all," even if Miró himself always insisted he was not part of any movement. He experimented with other styles, and he was one of the first to use "automatic drawing" as a way to avoid traditional painting techniques.

By the 1930s his reputation was well-established and his works started to feature prominently at major venues such as the Unesco headquarters in Paris. This, however, did not stop him from continuing to experiment with form and matter, and in his later years he explored the possibilities of four-dimensional painting and gas sculptures.

His grandson Punyet recalled an anecdote from 1973, when an 80-year-old Miró, tired of being associated with this or that artistic movement, decided to burn five of his paintings according to an African magic ritual, just to show that his creativity was still intact.

Miró: Tierra - Until September 14 at Museo Thyssen-Bornemissa. Paseo del Prado 8, Madrid. Tel: 913 690 151

By S. U.

[El Pais/Expatica]