Joan Miró i Ferrà

JOAN MIRÓ I FERRÀ (Barcelona, 1893 - Palma de Mallorca, 1983).
"Barcelona Series", 1972-1973.
Etching on paper. Copy 48/50.
Work reproduced in Dupin, p. 229.
With a slight tear in the upper area.
Presents watermark of the Gaspar room and on the back wet stamp of the Gaspar room.
Measurements: 70 x 105 cm.
Made in 1973 by Joan Miró, this work is inscribed in a stage of full maturity in the artist's career, marked by a radical formal purification and an intensification of the graphic language. Published by Sala Gaspar on the occasion of his 80th birthday, the piece not only commemorates a biographical milestone, but also synthesizes many of the constants that defined his visual universe.
Executed using the etching technique, the work reveals a particular interest in the materiality of the support and the expressiveness of the stroke. This technique allows Miró to explore deep hallmarks between black and white, generating surfaces that oscillate between the gestural and the almost tactile. Belonging to the so-called Barcelona Series, a set of fifty black and white lithographs, the piece is part of a coherent project, in which Miró develops a reduced but intensely evocative vocabulary of signs. The forms, often close to the biomorphic or calligraphic, refer to his usual imagery, although here they are stripped of color, which accentuates their essential and almost primitive character.
In stylistic terms, the piece can be read in continuity with the searches of Surrealism, although in a late phase in which the gesture becomes freer and the composition more open. Far from explicit narratives, Miró proposes here a space of poetic resonances, where sign, matter and emptiness are articulated in a constant tension.
Internationally acclaimed following the retrospective that the MOMA in New York dedicated to him in 1941, Joan Miró has won awards such as the Grand Prizes of the Venice Biennale and the Guggenheim Foundation, the Carnegie Prize for Painting, the Gold Medals of the Generalitat de Catalunya and of the Fine Arts, etc. His work can currently be seen at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, as well as in the main contemporary art museums around the world, such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza, the MoMA in New York, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the National Gallery in Washington, the MNAM in Paris and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.