HAMBURG.- For the first time an exhibition focuses on Joan Miró’s relationship to literature and his friendship with major writers. Displaying around 100 works from all his creative periods, this show at the Bucerius Kunst Forum examines literary influences on Miró’s painting and demonstrates how he influenced writers in his vicinity. From January 31 to May 25, 2015 Miró. Painting as Poetry brings together loans from internationally renowned collections including the Successió Miró, the Fundació Miró in Barcelona, the Fundació Miró in Palma de Mallorca, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the MoMA and the Tate. The exhibition has been created in cooperation with the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf.

With his imaginative motifs, Joan Miró (1893-1983) is one of the most popular artists of the twentieth century. He envisioned a dynamic art that affects life itself. Painting gave him the means to create his own unique world. Instead of rendering reality, his work was characterized by a new emotional pictorial language. In February 1920, the 27-year-old Miró left his native city of Barcelona in pursuit of inspiration and recognition in Paris. He moved into a studio building on rue Blomet which became a gathering place for literary Paris. Miró, who loved to read, was greatly influenced by his friendship to avant-garde authors such as Tristan Tzara, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard and Michel Leiris. Miró pushed the boundaries of painting, incorporating letters and words to generate associations in many of his painting poems – a term that became the title of many of his paintings after 1925. With a deft hand, Miró ranged between various media and discovered new visual worlds and artistic techniques while working on paintings and books.

For the first time, an exhibition takes a close look at Joan Miró’s relationship to literature and his friendship to major twentieth century writers. Miró. Painting as Poetry shows how Miró’s pictorial symbolism emerged from his playful treatment of words and images. The combination of text and image is of central importance to Surrealism. Unlike Cubism, which dealt with allusions to reality, Surrealistic painters saw words as triggers for associations. Miró decisively influenced this understanding. His works inspired both his younger fellow painter René Magritte as well as André Breton, the pope of Surrealism. Just as Miró was inspired by literary works, his own works inspired poets. Miró and his writer friends created numerous joint projects together.

In addition to around 50 paintings from all his creative periods, this show, curated by Michael Peppiatt and Ortrud Westheider, displays a representative selection from the more than 250 illustrated books that Miró designed. Loans come from internationally renowned collections including the Successió Miró and the Fundació Miró in Palma de Mallorca, the Fundació Miró in Barcelona, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Tate in London and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf.

In preparation for the exhibition an international symposium was held in Hamburg in June 2014. Miró experts from Spain, Great Britain and Germany engaged in the main themes of the show. The results of this academic symposium, which included Marion Ackermann (Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfalen, Düsseldorf), Valerie Hortolani (Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf), Michael Peppiatt (Guest Curator, London), Joan Punyet Miró (Successió Joan Miró, Barcelona, grandson of Joan Miró), Laetitia Rimpau (Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt) and Ortrud Westheider (Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg) has been published in the exhibition catalog published by Hirmer Verlag, Munich (approx. 224 pages with color illustration of all works on display, € 29.00 at the exhibition).