BARCELONA.- As the culmination of its 40th anniversary, the Fundació Joan Miró is updating its permanent exhibition in order to offer visitors a multifaceted approach to the artist’s work. The public will discover the creative complexity of an artist who, grounded in a strong connection to his origins, became a universal figure.

The collection is now enriched with the addition of new works in large part from the Miró family, the integration of the Kazumasa Katsuta collection that had previously been housed in a separate gallery space, and the recovery of some key pieces from the Fundació’s holdings, such as the triptychs Painting on white background for the cell of a recluse (1968) and The hope of a condemned man (1974), or the Barcelona Series, among others.

The permanent exhibition now includes some 150 works presented in eight sections that highlight different aspects of the artist’s creative investigations. Closing the exhibition is a new multimedia room that explores Miró’s universe through a mural that takes the form of a conceptual constellation.

The exhibition occupies an area of 1,558 m2 and is located in the galleries conceived by Joan Miró and architect Josep Lluís Sert to house the collection, and which were expanded in 1988 by Jaume Freixa. The display enhances the unique dialogue between art, architecture and landscape that characterizes the Fundació.

Joan Miró. Collection is a project by the team of the Fundació Joan Miró, initiated by Rosa Maria Malet, director, and Teresa Montaner, head of conservation. The project counted with a budget of 900,000 euros that covered the production of the exhibition and the required reformation work on the galleries.

Joan Miró. Collection
With the aim of continuing our investigation into Joan Miró’s life and work, the Fundació has delved deeply into its collection in order to make available to the public a renewed interpretation of the artist’s oeuvre. The new presentation highlights the value of an archive that represents the institution’s forty years of history: a unique collection that preserves the artist’s original selection of work for the Fundació’s opening. Above all, however, it is a living and comprehensive collection that continues to grow with new deposits and donations, offering multiple avenues of research into and dissemination of Miró’s artistic career.

Joan Miró’s donation of a collection of works forty years ago was the Fundació’s point of departure. Today, thanks to the continued support of the Miró family, the deposit of the Kazumasa Katsuta collection, and the complicity of the artist’s collaborators and collectors of his work, the Fundació Joan Miró can offer scholars and visitors a rich and diverse collection.

Beginning on 9 April, with the renovation of its permanent exhibition, the Fundació Joan Miró shines a new spotlight on these resources with the objective of offering a comprehensive and contemporary view of the artist’s work.

The permanent exhibition features some 150 works, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics and textiles, that unfold over eight areas of study. The exhibition opens with Autoretrat (Self-portrait, 1937–60), a work executed in two stages that synthesizes two pillars of the new presentation: on one hand, a move from individualistic expression to universal symbolism, and, on the other, the creative process of an artist who constantly revised his work.

More than a chronological overview of his career, the exhibition looks at the complexity and ultimate significance of Miró’s creative legacy: the will to distil what is unique to mankind. For the artist, this desire involves an affirmation of identity that emerges from contact with the land as a lived experience and, specifically, with Mont-roig del Camp, as the initial source of his creation, which is explored in the first section, The Land.

Yet this desire only materialized itself through the constant revision of his work and his relationship with the Parisian avant-garde, an idea reflected in the second section: Beyond Painting. The historical context, which was marked by a backdrop of armed conflict, also influences his creation, as evidenced by the works exhibited in Violence, Escape.

In the following sections, Anonymity and Poetry and Silence, the simplification of his language of signs and an interest in Zen spirituality led the artist to transcend the individualistic conception of art. This sentiment – a search for a collective and public art – was reiterated by the artist throughout his career, as reflected in the sections Anti-Painting, Sobreteixims and Art and Everyday Life. The new permanent exhibition reveals how Miró’s ambitions took on a dimension that went beyond the individual to become truly universal.

The presentation is completed with new wall texts introducing each of the sections and specific commentaries on over forty works. These texts are provided to visitors in four languages: Catalan, Spanish, English and French, the last of which was recently adopted by the Fundació.

A Living Collection
The new permanent exhibition presents a dynamic collection as result of the addition of new works on deposit from the Miró family that reinforce the Fundació’s archives and allow, for example, the reuniting of works originally conceived as diptychs, such as El dia (The day) and La nit (The night), both of 1974, which have not been shown together since their exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris that same year.

The integration of the Kazumasa Katsuta collection, which had formerly occupied its own gallery, into the main body of the permanent collection emphasizes the unitary approach of this new presentation. This initiative allows us to reunite works previously exhibited together, such as Cabell perseguit per dos planetes (Hair pursued by two planets, 1968) and Gota d’aigua damunt la neu rosa (Drop of water on the rose-coloured snow, 1968), and Dona, ocell I, II, III (Woman, bird I, II, III, 1972–73), among others.

The new narrative retrieves some key works from the Fundació’s archives, such as the Barcelona Series (1939–44), comprised of fifty black-and-white lithographs, of which there are only five complete editions and two sets of artist’s proofs, one of which was donated to the Fundació Joan Miró by Joan Prats and is extensively represented here.

This series of lithographs is displayed in a room entirely dedicated to works on paper that, following conservational and conceptual criteria, will be updated periodically. This space also allows us to show lesser-known works from the drawing archive of the Fundació, which is an international reference for the study and research of Miró’s work, reinforced by the Miró Chair, a joint initiative between the Fundació Joan Miró and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC).

The incorporation of important works in the form of new deposits and the inclusion of the Katsuta collection within the general itinerary allows works to be rotated and will thus permit the presentation of a dynamic and constantly renewed collection.

Art, Architecture and Landscape
Joan Miró. Collection occupies an area of 1,558 square meters and is presented in the galleries conceived by Joan Miró and architect Josep Lluís Sert to house the artist’s works. The Fundació thus pays tribute to the singular complicity of these two creators, whose efforts resulted in a truly exceptional circumstance: the construction of a museum space expressly conceived by an artist for his work: ‘a unique place in the world’, just as Miró had dreamed of in a notation he made to a letter from Sert in 1968.

The new approach to the collection celebrates these origins and emphasizes the uniqueness of the Fundació as a Mediterranean building where art, architecture and landscape intimately coexist. Joan Miró. Collection is a production of the team of the Fundació Joan Miró, and the design of the new permanent exhibition was realized by Guri Casajuana Arquitectes. The project, with a budget of 900,000 euros, also included renovation work and the improvement of the installations of the exhibition spaces.

The Origins of the Space
The friendship and dialogue between the architect and artist – in evidence in their correspondence about the project – produced one of the most outstanding exemplars of rationalist architecture in Barcelona, a building rooted in tradition and incorporated into the landscape which is in perfect harmony with Miró’s oeuvre.

Josep Lluís Sert was intimately familiar with the requirements for the spaces destined for the art and personality of the artist, having previously designed his studio in Mallorca in 1956. He thus knew how to respond to Miró’s desire to create a lively and dynamic centre in Barcelona, an anti-monumental building open to the city that also creates, through its patios, an interior world allowing visitors to come into contact with art and to intensely experience Miró’s work.

A Dialogue Between the Work and the Building
The project for the reorganization of the collection proposed by Rosa Maria Malet, director of the Fundació Joan Miró, and Teresa Montaner, head of conservation, and developed by the Fundació’s team, re-establishes the unique dialogue between Miró’s work and the building designed to house it. The new permanent exhibition is presented in the original galleries, which were extended in 1988 by architect Jaume Freixa, who had worked with Sert on the building’s design.

Joan Miró. Collection recovers some of the spaces designed specifically for certain works, such as the apses (also called chapels) for contemplating the triptychs Pintura sobre fons blanc per a la cel·la d’un solitari I, II, III (Painting on white background for the cell of a recluse I, II, III, 1968) and L’esperança del condemnat a mort I, II, III (The hope of a condemned man I, II, III, 1974), reproducing the form in which the artist wanted them exhibited and as he had arranged them in his studio in Son Boter.

In addition, the new exhibition unfolds according to Sert’s original circulation plan, which revolves around a central patio that allows visitors to avoid retracing their steps as they are in permanent contact with nature and the city, visible through the large windows. A great number of these windows have been recovered with the new presentation. The dialogue between building and landscape was the determining factor in the location of works in the collection’s new distribution.

Miró Atmosphere
While planning the Fundació, Miró and architect Josep Lluís Sert established the need to provide spaces for rest that would permit visitors to internalize the experience, spaces where the public were not conditioned by the presence of works and could contemplate their own thoughts. ‘Without seeing the works’, the artist said about the project in a 1968 letter to the architect.

For this reason, a multidisciplinary room closes the collection’s new presentation, offering visitors a space for reflection and a deeper experience of Miró’s universe through different media. Specifically, a conceptual mural traces a constellation between the most significant artistic, personal, social and historical relations for understanding and contextualizing Miró’s work.

The space is completed with an audiovisual installation offering a film and video programme about Miró’s creative processes, a selection of images by Joaquim Gomis that capture the creative atmosphere of the artist, and a place for consulting publications and online resources.