Joan Miró i Ferrà

JOAN MIRÓ I FERRÀ (Barcelona, 1893 - Palma de Mallorca, 1983).
"L'illêtre aux carreaux rouges", 1969.
Lithograph on canvas. Copy 40/75.
Edited and printed by Maeght.
Signed and justified in pencil.
Measurements: 85.1 x 60.3 cm; 98 x 73.5 cm (frame).
L'illêtre aux carreaux rouges belongs to a moment of full creative maturity of Joan Miró, when the artist had reached an absolutely personal language, refined and free of concessions. The work is part of his poetic universe of signs, hybrid figures and floating symbols, where the figurative and the abstract coexist without hierarchies. The "character" -that illêtre, an almost primitive and imaginary being-, appears constructed from simple forms and an intense black, with the characteristic red squares that provide visual rhythm and compositional tension, functioning almost like anchors within the pictorial space.
In 1969, Miró was in a stage of radical experimentation and strong conceptual charge. He was living between Mallorca and his stays in Paris, and was deeply interested in breaking with traditional painting, even going so far as to speak of "anti-painting". In those years he explored more bare surfaces, more direct gestures and an increasingly essential iconography, influenced as much by children's art as by primitive art and oriental calligraphy.
Joan Miró trained in Barcelona between the Escuela de la Lonja and the Galí Academy, and made his early debut with his first exhibition in 1918 at the Dalmau Galleries. In 1920 he moved to Paris, where he came into contact with key figures of the avant-garde - Picasso, the Dadaists and the Surrealists - and began to develop a language of his own, influenced by Surrealist poetry, memory and the irrational. Although he signed the surrealist manifesto in 1924, his work evolved autonomously towards an ever greater synthesis, reducing forms to signs, lines and spots of color.
His international consecration came at the end of the 1920s, when the MoMA in New York acquired his works, and was definitively consolidated in 1941 with a major retrospective at this museum. From the 1950s onwards he extended his research to techniques such as engraving, lithography and ceramics. From 1956 until his death in 1983 he lived in Palma de Mallorca, while his prestige grew worldwide. Awarded the most important international prizes, his work became part of the main collections and museums of contemporary art in the world, with the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona as the cornerstone of his legacy.