Two Sundays ago, we attended the popular Joan Miró exhibit “Materiality and Metamorphosis” at the Casa de Serralves on its last free day.1 We knew it would be busy, but we arrived in the first wave of visitors and didn’t feel rushed at all while in the Casa.
My first exposure to Joan Miró’s work was in Barcelona many years ago, at Fundació Joan Miró. It’s been nearly 13 years, but I still remember certain details, such as the bright colours he uses and his surrealist style. The Serralves exhibit was all that and more: unusual techniques like setting his work on fire, objects like buckets and string, or industrial material such as tar.
More on the exhibit, from the Serralves Foundation website:
JOAN MIRÓ: MATERIALITY AND METAMORPHOSIS
FROM 01 OCT 2016 TO 28 JAN 2017The exhibition ‘Joan Miró: Materiality and Metamorphosis’ is based on the collection of 84 works by Miró, owned by the Portuguese State. This important exhibition is curated by Robert Lubar Messeri, a leading world expert in Miró’s work. Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira will be responsible for the exhibition’s architectural design.
The exhibition covers a six-decade period in Joan Mirós’s career – from 1924 to 1981. It focuses in particular on the transformation of pictorial languages that the Catalan artist first developed in the mid-1920s. The exhibition considers his artistic metamorphoses across the mediums of drawing, painting, collage and work in tapestry.
Miró’s visual thinking and the ways in which he negotiates between optical and tactile modes of sensation is examined in detail, as are the artist’s working processes.
The exhibition comprises around 80 works by Joan Miró from the collection of 85 works, most of which have never previously been seen by the general public, including six of his paintings on masonite produced in 1936 and six “sobreteixims” (tapestries) of 1973. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with a lead essay by the curator.
The work below is my favourite from the ground floor. I didn’t take as many photos of the works as I did the people interacting around them. There was a small room that showed film footage of Miró working, and what struck me from watching it was his seemingly random workflow. Yet, even after the burning and painting and what looked like a destruction of the piece (walking over it), at some point Miró knew when he was done. (Very unlike my own technique, which includes chronic revision.)
January 8, 2017
Album: Portugal [Winter 2016/2017]
- Until 2016, free days at Serralves were 10:00-13:00 every Sunday, and now they are only the first Monday of the month, for the exception of January. ↩