Miro, Joan

The painter Joan Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893 and died in Mallorca in 1983. He produced works in a variety of different styles, and using a wide range of materials, but the majority of them had a surrealist flavor.

He showed an early passion for art, and attended drawing classes while he was at primary school. In 1907 he enrolled at the School of Industrial and Fine Arts (the Llotja) in Barcelona, and studied there until 1910. In 1912, Miró was recovering from a bout of Typhoid, and decided that he wanted to follow his love of painting, and not a career in accounting that he had been attempting to pursue.   His first one man exhibition was in 1918 and in 1920, he visited Paris for the first time, and met Picasso. This is probably one of the main reasons why his style changed after this point, and Miró began to focus on more surreal paintings.

Around this time, Miró also started to become interested in object collages.  He moved away from painting for a while, and concentrated on sculptures. However, he also experimented with a wide variety of other artistic forms, including lithography, engraving, and painting over copper.   Miró continued to learn about, and experiment with, various materials and types of art, but it was his ceramic work that he concentrated on.

In the late 1950s, Miró began to produce commissioned works, particularly murals and large outdoor sculptures for locations around the world. In 1972, a building to house the Fundació Joan Miró, Centre d’Estudis d’Art Contemporani (The Joan Miró Foundation, Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art) was commissioned. It opened to the public in 1975, and it houses the largest collection of Miró’s works.  Other examples of Miró’s work can be found at museums and locations around the world.

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