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Indepth Arts News:
"Juan Miro: Parade of Obsessions"
2001-06-15 until 2001-09-02
Juan Miro Foundation
Barcelona, ,
ES
The Joan Miró Foundation was officially inaugurated on 18 June 1976 with the exhibition Joan Miró. Paintings, sculptures and drawings from the Foundation’s collections. Now, 25 years later, the Joan Miró Foundation is again presenting an exhibition of work by Miró containing nearly 200 sculptures, paintings, drawings and lithographs, mainly from its own collections, selected by Carme Escudero and Teresa Montaner, curators at the Foundation.
This exhibition is organised around the preliminary drawings and sketches that Miró produced in 1968 for L’Œil-Oiseau, a show combining music, poetry and dance, with scenario by Jacques Dupin, based on the artist’s work and creative process. They consist of some 20 images or signs that Miró described as his cortège d’obsessions, and include female genitalia, the star, the ladder of escape, the sun, the moon, etc.
Joan Miró. Parade of obsessions includes a section devoted to his self-portraits, which aims to be a kind of summary of the entire exhibition. Here, in a number of drawings done between 1938 and 1942 we can see how Miró developed his language of signs. Self-portrait 1937-38-1960 is a clear example of this. Based on a copy of his Self-portrait I, which he produced in 1937-38, Miró reworked it in 1960 in a totally different way. The figure is defined on the basis of his own obsessions, in order to reveal his inner world rather than his physical appearance.
The show illustrates how these images began to appear in the twenties and were present right up until Miró’s last works. The Foundation’s collection, which includes the artist’s sketchbooks and preliminary drawings, allows a comprehensive view of the evolution of these signs in his art.
All these signs were systematically incorporated into a visual language in the forties, as can be seen from the set of sketchbooks, which in some cases are exhibited for the very first time, or in the Barcelona series, where practically all of them appear together. From then on, Miró underwent a process of paring down that led him to represent his obsessions in a more isolated way, while at the same time he stopped giving his paintings poetic titles and named them after the obsession depicted.
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