1893-1983, Catalan painter, graphic artist and sculptor

Joan Miro is considered one of the most important representatives of surrealism. The artist, who significantly influenced the abstract expressionism, found himself at an abstract formal language of sharply contoured surreal characters, without abandoning the relationship to the object. After World War II, the art was never anything serious or foreboding for Miro, and so the images from this time was marked by a certain cheerful insistence.

The painting of sensation comes to their right with Miro (1893-1983). Constantly, one is confronted paintings, watercolours, drawings and graphics, with Miros lovely imagery. Miro created a world of dreams, surreal and strange and alien to their own people and everyone. "We will have a free art, we will release the spirit in a radiant freedom", these words Miro speak for his work.

Miro born on April 20, 1893 in Montroig at Barcelona, Miro began his artistic training at the Academy in Barcelona at the age of 14, where he remained until 1910. This was followed by the course of study in 1912-13 at the private art school of F.Galli, the Academy of the avant-garde. Influenced by a trip to Paris in 1919 and the encounter with Pablo Picasso, Miro was influenced by the cubism with the distinctive features of the new objectivity style and naive Painting Association.

The transition from the realistic perspective pictorial surrounded such announces in his programmatic work “The farm". The acquaintance with surrealist artists such as S.Dali and A.Breton, shows its marks in Miros work, which belonged to the co-signatories of the manifest and exhibited with the surrealists.

His painting once again, changed to hieroglyph landscapes that remind at times reminiscent of childlike drawings with amorphous figurations. The spiritual affinity to W.Kandinsky, P.Klee and H.Arp reveals itself.

Miros art is a specific art of characters, the calligraphy and the ideograms. Its whole meaning lies within its existances. It can be the flight or graceful, unobtrusive, how the flight of the bird or heavy as the furrow in the Earth" (Joan Teixidor)

In addition to the painting and the graphic work developed also ceramic wall picture, such as for the UNESCO building in Paris. He created the stage design together with Max Ernstfor S.Diaghilevs Romeo and Juliet Ballet.

Miro died on December 25, 1983 on Palma de Mallora, he avoids the total abstraction in his works and still wants a meaning to grant its motives, so that associative interpretations remain possible. The poetic imagery reminiscent of naive-childlike imagery, shows not only the joyful and ironic but also the world of dreams and fears.

Designation for the painting and sculpture detached from the representational portrayal, which spread from around 1910 in ever new style variations across the whole western and parts of the eastern world. Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, born in 1866, is considered to be the founder of abstract art. Among other important artists of abstract art are K.S. Malewitsch, Piet Mondrian, and others.

The field of graphic arts, that includes artistic representations, which are reproduced by various printing techniques.

Printmaking techniques include woodcuts, copperplate engraving, etching, lithography, serigraphy.

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Heliogravure
Woodcut
Copperplate engraving
Etching
Lithography
Serigraphy (Silk-screen printing)

A trend in contemporary arts that developed in Europe and America. In connection with psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud it searches the actual truth in the subconscious. Surrealism exploits dreams and ecstatic experiences, as well as hypnotic states, as a source of artistic inspiration.

Famous artists and sculptors in this trend are: Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Giorgio de Chirico, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, René Magritte.