The ten jewels of 'Paysage Miró' according to its curators

PalmThe fact that many of Joan Miró's works are so easily identifiable to most people might lead one to think that there is little new, few facets of the artist that, today, more than 40 years after his death, can still be surprising. Starting this week, however, the ambitious exhibition Miró Landscape, with more than a hundred works distributed across four venues in Palma, demonstrates exactly the opposite: that it is possible to rediscover, time and again, the artistic – and human – career of one of the great artists of the 20th century from multiple perspectives.

Conceived as a large exhibition project divided into four different spaces, Miró Landscape, the largest exhibition dedicated to the artist in decades, is structured around different axes connected by a common thread, although each of them functions independently. Until next January, it can be seen at the Fundació Miró Mallorca. The Magical Guspira, an exhibition that explores the objects and materials that inspired Miró, as well as the constellation of artists who surrounded him. At the Solleric house, on the other hand, both paintings and sculptures are displayed, mainly from the 60s and 70s, in search of the multiple links between both disciplines: painting understood as color and sculpture seen as shadow, in an exhibition entitled Color and its shadow.

The shadows continue in the Lonja, a space occupied by The initial forceThe proposal is made up of ten impressive sculptures with a black patina—ten ghostly beings—that invite you to view them from all possible angles. Finally, in Es Baluard, you'll find Coloring among things, an invitation to rediscover Miró's infinite rebelliousness, which manifests itself both in his ability to give identity to a patch of paint and in his desire to go beyond the limits of his paintings. Both the Es Baluard and Solleric exhibitions will be open until November 9, while the La Llotja exhibition will be on display until February.

Of the hundred or so works that can be seen in Palma over the coming months – many of which come from the Reina Sofía Museum and have never been seen in Palma – the project's curators, Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta, David Barro, Carmen Fernández Aparicio and Antonia Maria Perelló, have responded by identifying the essential ones, those that serve as a skein of Miró Landscape and its significance.

1. 'Femme, oiseau, star'

(Tribute to Pablo Picasso. 1966 - 1973)

At the Miró Mallorca Foundation

"It's a key painting from Joan Miró's late period in Mallorca," says Antònia Maria Perelló, director of the Miró Mallorca Foundation, who "finished it on the day of Picasso's death, April 8, 1973, and which, as we can see from the title, was dedicated to him." "Miró had met Picasso in Paris in 1920, and from then on, they maintained a mutual admiration and a friendship that grew stronger over time," she says. Perelló also highlights the importance of symbols—the woman as a reference to the earth, the bird to freedom, and the star representing the cosmos, the poetic and the spiritual.

2. 'Paysage'

1974. At the Miró Mallorca Foundation

The concept of landscape that gives the exhibition its title is present in all the displays, whether in a more abstract form, as in the Lonja, or in a more concrete form, in paintings like this one highlighted by Antònia Maria Perelló. "It belongs to a time when Miró was simplifying his compositions, in contrast, for example, with the complex and variegated Constellations from 1939 to 1941," explains the expert. "The echo of the East that I think I find in this canvas, due to its austerity, due to that low horizon, leads me, even, to want to see a single protruding figure," comments Perelló.

3. 'Personnage pour

Alexander Calder. 1947

At the Miró Mallorca Foundation

Not only can you see works by Joan Miró in Miró Landscape, but also exhibited—specifically at the Fundació Miró Mallorca—elements that serve to explain his imagery, whether his own or others'. In this case, the Coordinator of Culture and Tourism for Palma City Council, Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta, highlights the mobile character that Alexander Calder gave the artist. "A small object that encapsulates this wonderful world of impossible characters, where the ordinary, the everyday, and the magical shape the gaze, beauty, and art," explains the director of the Solleric center.

4. 'Oiseau Lunaire'

1966. At the Fish Market

One of the great technical challenges of Miró Landscape This impressive piece, which normally serves as the epicenter of the Sabatini Garden at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, has been moved to the Lonja, where it shares the stage with other ghostly beings in a setting that, surprisingly, seems organic to them. "It's a paradigmatic work, one of Miró's most evocative and monumental sculptures," summarizes David Barro, director of Es Baluard. "Despite its size, it stands out for the softness of its forms. It's neither human nor animal; it's a hybrid and simultaneously poetic invention," he adds.

5. 'Landscape of Mont-Roig'

1916. In Es Baluard

"I think Miró takes the idea of painting in color into new territory," begins David Barro. "It's true that in these early landscapes we don't find the most recognizable Miró, but we can already see a break with conventional pictorial space, with that intention of ceasing to paint things and instead painting among things, in a non-representational way," he explains. This is the earliest painting by Miró on display in the exhibition project, which, according to the director of Es Baluard, allows us "to get closer to the moment when he was beginning to discover his own language, beyond painting."

6. 'Landscape'

1976. In Es Baluard

"In Es Baluard we find the wildest Miró, the one who decided to 'murder painting' by painting, pushing its limits, burning his canvases, tearing them apart. A painting in which form, colour and idea are used without concessions by everyone, is completely preserved," Gómez de la Cuesta, who highlights "the minimal gesture, the complex and devastating symbolism of the dot, the line, the star, the colour and the blue stain that gives shape to dreams" in this painting in which Miró's signature becomes just another element.

7. 'Peinture I, II y III'

1973. In Es Baluard and the Fundació Miró

The triad comprised of these three paintings, two of which are exhibited at Es Baluard and the third at the Fundació Miró Mallorca, features a blue stain as its protagonist. "The precursor is the small painting-poem from 1925 in which a blue stain is accompanied by the phrase 'this is the color of my dreams,' in French. There are no visual formalities; it is through words and stains that Miró unites poetry and painting," notes the director of the Fundació Miró Mallorca. "It is a platform of possibilities for working from uncertainty."

8. 'Femmes VI'

1969. At the Solleric farmhouse

Carmen Fernández Aparicio, head of sculpture conservation at the Reina Sofía, says that choosing between the works in the museum's collection that can be seen in Miró Landscape It is "a difficult task," although she chooses three linked to the representation of women in Miró, "a central theme of his work with a positive and enriching vision." Among them, she highlights "the overflowing quality of Miró's art" that can be observed in Women VI, a painting he defines as "full of vitality and beauty, reflecting the artist's thoughts on women, always connected to poetry and nature."

9. 'Femme aux beaux seins'

1969. At the Solleric farmhouse

"This delicate and subtle sculpture is made from the hollowing out of a barbecue utensil, the central axis of the figure around which the rest of the forms become metaphors of the cosmic and earthly," suggests Carmen Fernández Aparicio, for whom this piece "has an air of lightness that contrasts with other works that depict other elements of the cosmic landscape." For the head of sculpture conservation at the Reina Sofía Museum, "the allusion to the solar circle is transmuted into a head and becomes, in turn, a reference to the shape of the breast, a maternal and sexual symbol," she says.

10. 'Personnage et oiseau'

1968. At the Solleric farmhouse

The sculpture chosen by Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta is one of the bronze pieces that can be seen in Solleric, and which contrast with those in the Lonja despite being directly connected. "Joan Miró's brilliant ability to give meaning to his characters, his women, his birds, connects with his incredible capacity to transform objects that belong to our ancestral culture into magical totems that rise from the earth, understood as origin, as a nation, and project themselves towards the sky, there where the Solleric.u