BARCELONA.- The Fundació Joan Miró presents From Miró to Barcelona, an exhibition on Joan Miró’s works in the city’s public spaces.

From Miró to Barcelona opens a new cycle of exhibitions titled Miró. Documents in which the Foundation’s artistic and documentary collections are the starting point for this review of Miró’s work. The opening exhibition aims to draw attention to Joan Miró’s legacy to Barcelona, starting from the late nineteen sixties.

Curated by Rosa Maria Malet, the exhibition presents Joan Miró´s preparatory models and sketches for the four works he conceived for the city: the Airport Mural, the Mosaic at the Pla de l’Os in La Rambla, a monumental sculpture for the Parc de Cervantes, and the Fundació Joan Miró.

The exhibition will be open to the public from 9 May to 2 November 2014 in the Foundation’s Emili Fernández Miró room. In accordance with Joan Miró’s wish to offer these works to the city of Barcelona, the exhibition will be free of charge.

The exhibition shows the preparatory sketches and models, together with the documents and correspondence pertaining to each of these gifts offered by Miró to Barcelona. The historical and social context motivating Miró to make these donations is analysed, while the concept of art in public space and the pertinence of these works as symbols of the city are also studied.

The preliminary works by Joan Miró make it possible to understand his creative process in each of these works and his point of view at the time he conceived them as urban interventions. The exhibition reviews the early stages in the production of the four gifts that Miró offered to Barcelona: the Airport Mural, the Mosaic at the Pla de l’Os in La Rambla, a monumental sculpture for the Parc de Cervantes (which did not materialise in the end) and the Fundació Joan Miró. The model for his monumental sculpture, subsequently titled Miss Chicago, has been conserved and is now located on the Foundation’s North Patio which, on the occasion of the exhibition, will be open to the public from 9 May to 24 June.

In the case of the Airport Mural, a film by Francesc Català-Roca will be shown for the first time. Conserved at the Filmoteca de Catalunya, this film shows the preliminary stages of Miró’s and Artigas’ work.

Joan Miró conceived the four works for public spaces in Barcelona as symbols of modernity and the international opening up of the city. In all four cases, Miró shared with the architect Josep Lluís Sert the vision of making cities more human and art more accessible.

In producing these works, Miró worked closely with Sert, who designed the Foundation, as well as with the sculptors and potters Josep Llorens Artigas and his son Joan Gardy Artigas. With these joint projects, Miró fulfilled his wish to engage in shared creation.

Commissioned by the Barcelona City Council, Miró created one more, final, work for public space in the early nineteen eighties, the sculpture Woman and Bird for the Parc de l’Escorxador.

In the texts of the exhibition catalogue, the journalist Lluís Permanyer evokes the time when Joan Miró informed him of his intention to offer four gifts to Barcelona; the philosopher Josep Ramoneda provides a context for considering the value of art in public space; and Rosa Maria Malet, the exhibition curator and director of the Foundation, gives a detailed account of Joan Miró’s personal and artistic circumstances when he conceived his four donations to the city and the creative process entailed in each one.

The exhibition series Miró. Documents and the set of publications of the same title aim to carry out an in-depth study of the Fundació Joan Miró’s collections. In subsequent exhibitions, the Foundation plans to present other themes related with Miró’s work and to explain them by means of documents it conserves.

This exhibition has been achieved thanks to the help and support of the Cercle Miró, which is comprised by individuals from the business and professional spheres who, motivated by their interest in contemporary art and in Joan Miró, make an annual contribution to the Foundation.

The opening of the exhibition coincides with the launch of the ‘Joan Miró’ app, which offers an approximation to Joan Miró’s works in the public spaces of Barcelona, including a route whereby the user can explore the city in which Miró lived. The app shows new points of historical interest along the route and provides detailed information concerning it.