Page 40 - World of Art Contemporary Art magazine: The 2023 Guggenheim issue

for Miró, who proposed returning to the dawn of
WORLD-CLASS ART
JOAN MIRÓ:
ABSOLUTE REALITY, PARIS,
1920–1945
Exhibitions: Joan Miró. Absolute Reality. Paris, 1920–1945
Curator: Enrique Juncosa. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and 1945 of one of the most outstanding artists
IN THE 25 YEARS OF ACTIVITY COVERED BY THE
EXHIBITION, THERE IS A CONSTANT FLOW OF NEW IDEAS
RANGING FROM HIS INITIAL MAGIC REALISM TO HIS
LANGUAGE OF CONSTELLATED SIGNS.
In this development, it becomes clear that
prehistoric art, including rock paintings,
petroglyphs, and statuettes, held a special interest
38 WORLD of ART
Admired for his formal innovations developed in
art in order to retrieve its original spiritual sense.
the context of the first avant-garde movements,
especially Dadaism and Surrealism, Miró is also
considered a precursor of Abstract Expressionism
and Conceptual Art.
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Joan Miró:
Absolute Reality. Paris, 1920–1945, an exhibition
that explores the career between the years 1920
of the 20th century. The start of this fundamental
period in Miró’s oeuvre is marked by the date of his
first trip to Paris, a key city in his life and work, and
it closes with the year when Miró, after producing
his Constellations (1940–41) and then hardly
painting at all for some years, created a great series
of works on white backgrounds that consolidated
his language of signs floating on ambiguous
grounds.
Joan Miró. Painting-Poem (A Star Caresses the Breast of a Negress) [Peinture-
poème (Une étoile caresse le sein d'une négresse)], 1938 Oil on canvas 129.5 x
194.3 cm. Tate: Purchased 1983. © Successió Miró, 2023. Photo © Tate/Tate Images