Joan Miró

JOAN MIRÓ (Barcelona, 1893 - Palma de Mallorca, 1983).
"El llibre dels sis sentits", 1981.
Etching and aquatint. H.C. copy.
Signed and numbered by hand.
Certified by the Fundació Joan Miró on the back.
Measurements: 71 × 54 cm (print); 92 × 73 cm (sheet); 100 × 79.5 cm (frame).

This engraving belongs to the suite "Llibre dels sis sentits", an album published by the Sala Gaspar in Barcelona and formed by six aquatints conceived by Joan Miró as a plastic transposition of six poems by his admired friend, the Catalan poet Miquel Martí i Pol. The verses, focused on the vulnerability of old age, illness and solitary suffering, found in Miró a visual translation of great lyrical intensity, capable of transmitting, in the words of Martí i Pol himself, a deep sense of peace and contained emotion.

The composition is organized by means of wide chromatic fields, which coexist with a central nucleus of grayish tones crossed by signs, lines and graphics of spontaneous appearance. These elements, characteristic of Miró's vocabulary, generate an open and dynamic space, where the image seems to expand beyond its physical limits.

Miró does not literally illustrate the poem, but accompanies it with an autonomous language based on the relationship between color, gesture and sign.

Joan Miró trained in Barcelona, where he had his first solo exhibition in 1918 at the Dalmau Galleries. In 1920 he moved to Paris, coming into contact with the surrealist circle, where he developed his own language based on free association, memory and the irrational. His international recognition came soon: in 1928 the MoMA in New York acquired his works, and in 1941 he was the subject of a major retrospective.

Throughout his career he received important distinctions, such as awards at the Venice Biennale and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the Gold Medals of Fine Arts and the Generalitat de Catalunya. His work is now held in leading institutions such as the Joan Miró Foundation (Barcelona), the MoMA (New York), the Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid), the National Gallery of Art (Washington) and the Centre Pompidou (Paris).