SAN JUAN.- Joan Miró saw art as an intrinsic part of life, with magical attributes that had to be reclaimed. To achieve this objective, he did not hesitate to tear up the academic conventions of painting. Like other artists linked to the surrealist world, he sought inspiration in primitive artistic manifestations, which were formally simple yet full of sacred connotations.

With the art of prehistory, mediaeval masters and popular culture as his points of reference, Miró wanted to go beyond the mimetic representation of reality and gradually simplified forms until he was left only with what was essential. This practice gave rise to a unique language of signs, which had begun to develop in the 1920s in Mont-roig del Camp (a village in the Province of Tarragona) and became crystallised in the early 1940s. And it was a language he would never give up. In Miró’s work, the night, the constellations, the figure of the woman – understood as a symbolic representation of fertility, reproduction or sexuality – and the bird forever became expressions of a universe of creation and renewal.

‘A form is never something abstract; it is always a sign of something.
It is always a man, a bird or something else.’
Joan Miró interviewed by James Johnson Sweeney

The Miró Universe project immerses us in Joan Miró’s unique and personal creative process, and gives us an insight into the mind and practices of one of the most important artists of the 20th century. The show explores the artist’s language of signs through a concise and careful selection of paintings and sculptures from his latter years, which come from the Fundació Joan Miró’s holdings. The ensemble includes the 1978 paintings Woman in the Night, Woman, Figures and Birds with a Dog and Figures and Birds in a Nocturnal Landscape which, in addition to developing the artist’s language of signs, present another key element of his universe: the use of vivid colours. In the words of Dolors Rodríguez Roig, curator of the project and author of the text of the publication accompanying the exhibition, ‘pure colours responded not only to Miró’s desire to bring his works as close as possible to people, but also to a shift towards pop art. They also served to emphasise his language and the symbolism of his representations, whatever artistic medium he used’. The selection is completed by the 1969 sculpture Sir, Madam, which, according to Rodríguez Roig, exemplifies how Miró ‘changed the traditional perception of sculpture with his visual and poetic games’.

Miró Universe presents photographs of the artist’s personal library and of the collection of objects he kept in his studio. These photographs are by Joaquim Gomis (Barcelona, 1902-1991), an art promoter and a great friend of Joan Miró, who photographed the artist’s work and creative environment throughout his career. Gomis was the first president of the Board of Trustees of the Fundació Joan Miró where, at the wishes of his heirs, his photographic archive deposited in the National Archive of Catalonia is managed and disseminated.

The Miró Universe project is being presented in Puerto Rico following its showing between 2019 and 2022 at the Spanish embassies in Rome, Berlin, Dublin, Brussels, Paris and New Delhi, as well as at the Cultural Centre of Spain in Mexico, thanks to the collaboration between the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, Abertis and its Foundation, and the Fundació Joan Miró.