NEW YORK, NY.- Opera Gallery is presenting ‘Kindred Spirits: Joan Miró and Alexander Calder,’ a major exhibition that explores the visual and personal affinities between the landmark American and Spanish artists Alexander Calder and Joan Miró.

Presented as an exploration of their shared interest in color and move- ment—and, just as compellingly, their collective fascination with the absence of color and movement—the exhibition is a discourse between generations that celebrates the pair’s friendship and their extraordinary experiences as artists who were shaped by significant periods of time spent living in Paris.

Over the two floors of the Opera Gallery building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a dynamic exchange between two virtuosic talents will take shape. Though emerging in very different contexts—Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893, Calder in Lawnton in 1898—the two artists forged a lasting friendship after first meeting in 1928.

The works on display suggest intriguing intersections, animated by the tension between figuration and abstraction. Inherently playful, with whimsical lines and organic shapes, the oscillation between two- and three- dimensionality (which, in Calder’s case, extends to four-dimensionality) is remarkably present as an element of each artist’s oeuvre.

The aesthetic dialogue between Calder and Miró extends through an attendant display of art directly exchanged as gestures of friendship and mutual artistic rapport. Comprising approximately two dozen paintings and sculptures made over a forty-year period, Calder’s mobile New Old Universe (1953) and his stabile Crag with Red Heart (1974), with Miró’s paintings Femme, oiseaux, étoile II (1967) and Personnage (1974) will be among the works on view.

Presented with archival imagery of the pair’s time in Varengeville- sur-Mer in Normandy ‘Kindred Spirits’ illuminates a relationship where creativity and high personal regard were beautifully intertwined. The works speak to the artists’ individual pursuit of essential form and space, sitting in perfect union next to each other.