TAIPEI.- The exhibition Joan Miró. Women, Birds, Stars, with 86 works by the artist, is touring Taiwan.

The Fundació Joan Miró is lending over eighty works from the Collection for a touring exhibition that opened on 7 June in Taipei and will later travel to Kaohsiung and Taichung.

The exhibition, curated by Jordi Joan Clavero, head of the Fundació’s Education Department, aims at opening a new perspective on Miró’s late work through the artist’s most essential imaginary.

Joan Miró. Women, Birds, Stars includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and lithographs, as well as a series of photographs, reflecting Miró’s intense creativity from the fifties onwards and the consolidation of his own language.

The exhibition is presented in three parts: the first delves into Miró’s imaginary; the second shows the artist’s experimentation with new techniques and materials; and the third explores the new meanings attributed by Miró to everyday objects.

This is the first time that the Fundació Joan Miró has sent an exhibition to Taiwan. Previously, it had organised an exhibition of Miró’s work in China and on several occasions in Japan and Korea. The National Museum of History in Taipei, the first leg of the exhibition, was founded in 1955 with the aim of preserving the national heritage, organising art exhibitions and promoting art education. In 2012 the Museum had over 710,000 visitors.

Out of the total of works travelling to Taiwan, eighty-one belong to the Fundació Joan Miró’s Collection and the Miró Estate has lent five. The artistic period represented in the show covers the last twenty years of the artist’s production, although a few earlier works have been included to help with the contextualisation.

In 1956 Miró moved to Palma, where he began working on a large format and combining painting with other techniques such as sculpture and printmaking. It was at that time that the artist consolidated his language of signs as a conceptual frame for his creations and began experimenting widely with new techniques.

The exhibition is centred around the themes explored by the artist over the years. Defining his own style, Miró reduced his colours to an elementary palette and restricted himself to a formal vocabulary composed of terms such as figure, woman, bird, moon, sun, stars, constellations, and ladder of escape.

The works are presented following a triple thematic division. The first part, Signs, delves into Miró’s cosmology in his later works. During the period covered by the exhibition, this imaginary is present in most of the compositions.

The second part, Techniques, includes works that explore new techniques and materials. They show Miró’s experimentation in the fields of painting, sculpture and printmaking, where signs are sometimes reduced to the background.

The third and last part, Object, includes a series of works where the artist gives new meaning to objects beyond their practical function. Miró applies his artistic view of objects to sculptures and textile works. Signs are substituted for objects, thus maintaining the same iconography developed in his paintings.