Joan (Joan)
Miro

1893−1983

Biography and information

Joan Miro y Ferrat (Cat. Joan Miró i Ferrà, April 20, 1893, Barcelona - December 25, 1983, Palma de Mallorca) - Catalan artist, sculptor, graphic artist, one of the most significant innovators and experimenters of contemporary art. He did not belong to any of the artistic movements of the twentieth century, although he was close for some time with the surrealists.

Before World War II, Miro lived and worked in Paris for a long time as the center of artistic life, but he always spent the summer in Spain. After the war, he settled in Mallorca, where he left only to participate in large-scale orders and exhibitions.

Features of the artist Joan Miro: close friendship with surrealists, joint exhibitions, similar directions of searches often seem to be a good enough occasion to enroll Miró among these artists. But he always went his own way, while he never finished searching for a new pictorial language, new pictorial means. His works, despite the apparent simplicity and spontaneity, were always carefully thought out, compositions, shapes and color combinations were measured out. In his paintings there was not a single random point. Even in his first years in Paris, he said "I want to kill painting" - and he has been doing this all his life, inventively choosing means for reprisal. He abandoned subject painting and led the search into an area close to abstraction. Often, characters declared in the title of the work can be found only by conventional symbols and approximate outlines. The moon, birds, stairs, stars, biomorphic figures, often signs and symbols resembling hieroglyphs of a nonexistent language are Miro's favorite images that prevent the viewer from losing balance, a sense of reality.
In different periods of creativity, Miro is not equal to the past. He could abandon painting for several years and work only on ceramics, and then engage only in sculpture and engraving. But in painting, he did not stop at the worked method: he wrote with his fingers, set fire to canvases, sprayed paints, painted huge canvases in one color and left a point or line in a carefully chosen place.

Famous works of Joan Miró: "Farm", Blue, “Constellations. Woman and Birds, "Harlequin Carnival","Still life with an old boat".