Joan Miró, Pintura (La estrella), 1927 / Courtesy The David & Ezra Nahmad Collection © Successió Miró, 2023
Joan Miró. Absolute Reality
Feb 10 – May 28, 2023
Guggenheim Bilbao
Bilbao, Spain

Joan Miró is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. His work is admired for its radical formal innovations developed in the context of the first avant-garde movements, especially Dadaism and Surrealism. Miró was also interested in spiritual matters and fascinated by mysticism, visions, and dreams. His work, moreover, admits political readings, taking into consideration his sympathy for Catalan nationalism and his opposition to Franco’s dictatorship. Forty years after his death, his art has lost none of its seductively enigmatic nature.

Absolute Reality explores a key phase in Miró’s career, the period from 1920 – his first trip to Paris – to 1945. These years are characterized by a constant flow of ideas ranging from his initial magic realism to a personal vocabulary of constellated or floating signs on ambiguous backgrounds. In this development, it becomes clear that prehistoric art, including rock paintings, petroglyphs, and statuettes, held a particular attraction for Miró, who proposed returning to the dawn of art in order to retrieve its original spiritual sense.

Miró effected a constant transformation of lived experience into art. Every mark he painted on his works corresponded to something specific, and was anchored to a profound reality that formed part of reality itself.

Curated by Enrique Juncosa

OTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS
  • Jimmy DeSana
    Nov 4, 2023 – Jan 6, 2024
    Meyer Riegger
    Berlin, Germany

    The Queer photographer Jimmy DeSana worked in New York from 1973 until his premature death from AIDS-related illness in 1990. No wave music, club culture, performance art, the Pictures Generation, mail art: not only was DeSana a prominent figure in these scenes, he also became a chronicler of Queer New York subculture in the 1970s and 1980s through his photographs. (more…)