PADUA.- The Serralves Foundation is presenting the exhibition "Joan Miró: Materiality and Metamorphosis", in the Italian city of Padua, encompassing 85 works from the Joan Miró Collection, owned by the Portuguese State. The exhibition is being presented at the Fondazione Bano – one of Italy’s leading cultural institutions.

In the wake of the success of this exhibition in the Serralves Foundation, on display between October 2016 and June 2017, with over 240,000 visitors, and its subsequent presentation in the National Palace of Ajuda, in Lisbon, between September 2017 and February 2018, with 49,265 visitors, the exhibition is now being shown in the Fondazione Bano until June 2018.

Fondazione Bano is a leading Italian cultural institution. It was founded in 1997 by Federico Bano, an Italian entrepreneur from the field of fashion, who acquired the Palazzo Zabarella in Padua, to recover and transform it into an arts and cultural centre. Since its inaugural exhibition in 1997 (a retrospective of the works of the French painter, Maurice Utrillo), the Foundation has received more than 2 million visitors and has organized many exhibitions dedicated to 19th and 20th century art, by artists such as Giacomo Balla, Francesco Hayez, Caravaggio, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Anton Raphael Mengs, Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Antonio Canova and Modigliani. Fondazione Bano works in close cooperation with some of the world’s most important museums and art collectors, to present outstanding works to its visitors.

"Joan Miró: Materiality and Metamorphosis", organized by Serralves and now presented in the spaces of the Palazzo Zabarella, is once again coordinated by Marta Almeida, deputy director of Serralves Museum, and is curated by the world's leading specialist in Miró’s oeuvre, Robert Lubar Messeri.

The exhibition spans works from Joan Miró’s six-decade career - from 1924 to 1981 – and focuses on the transformation of the pictorial languages ​​developed by the Catalan artist from the 1920s onwards. The exhibition explores Miró's artistic metamorphoses in the fields of drawing, painting, collage and tapestry work, observing his visual thinking in detail, the way that he worked with tactile and optical sensations, and the processes and techniques he used to create his works.