We look back to an article that the art critic Arnau Puig wrote for the Fundació Joan Miró several years ago and that continues to be relevant today. It is a look at the body and art with no boundaries, which ties into the recent proposal of a tour of the Joan Miró Collection from a queer perspective.
Continue reading Bodies with no Boundaries
What do artists need to work under good enough conditions? A place where they can develop their work without (too many) strictures? A room of their own? Enric Farrés Duran and Xavier Ristol are projecting their dream studio with features that are both physical and intangible, for the exhibition Shared Studios. Three Case Studies. A specific kind of light, an environment, a mental space where all sorts of random encounters may occur.
Continue reading I Dream of A Large Studio
Miró dreamt of a large studio. At one point or another, all artists have dreamt of a large studio – a creative space that would enable them to build their utterly personal microcosm. Coinciding with the exhibition Shared Studios. Three Case Studies, which explores the experiences and affinities of artists working in the same space, we wanted to look back at one of Miró’s first studios, in the Paris of the 1920s, at 45 Rue Blomet.
Continue reading Rue Blomet, a Space for Poetry
In the framework of the exhibition You Don’t Hear Me by Nalini Malani, recently nominated for the Global Fine Arts Award 2020, the Fundació Joan Miró wants to expand the thought and the social and political sensitivity of the artist to our current context.
The biographies that follow, adapted by the editor and writer Francisco Llorca, correspond to women or groups that, through their commitment or activism, have contributed to creating awareness in other people, communities or society.
Continue reading If More Attention Were Paid to Female Thought
For the last four years, Serafín Álvarez has been working with pupils following a baccalaureate course focusing on the arts to give them insights into contemporary art by introducing them to professional working processes and by encouraging critical thinking about artistic creation. This academic year, the pandemic has disrupted everything.
Continue reading Orbiting in a Room
In the midst of uncertainty, myths allow us to delve into the incomprehensible, put time on hold, observe the world from a new perspective and, from that timelessness, try to give shape to the invisible. In this post, on the occasion of the Fundació Joan Miró’s reopening and the presentation of the Nalini Malani exhibition to the public, artist and storyteller Michael Gadish brings us to the concept of the myth via the Indian tradition. Gadish combines research on Sanskrit and Hebrew, mythology, religion, and art and, since 2015, has been organizing performances focused on the sacred writings of India.
Continue reading The Language of the Invisible
There is a lot of talk these days about inclusion and social transformation –also, and increasingly so, in the art world. The Fundació Joan Miró, as part of the “la Caixa” Art for Change program, has offered the Ssssoundssss exhibition, the final outcome of a project produced in collaboration with artist Laura Llanelli and two occupational centres run by Asproseat, a wonderful opportunity to bring art to a real, diverse public. Núria Plasència, a psychologist with an MA in counselling who works at the La Marina and 1981 occupational centres run by Fundació Asproseat’s Day Services, gives us a first-hand account of that experience.
Continue reading Art for everyone
The architect Lina Bo Bardi, to whom the Fundació Joan Miró devoted an exhibition focused on her strong connection to drawing, conceived her projects as spaces that were accessible to everyone, brimming with nature and life. Her watercolours of urban scenes are also full of everyday life, like the piece illustrating the atmosphere at Praça Getúlio Vargas, in Río de Janeiro, in 1946. Amanda Bassa delves into this image and the ambient sounds surrounding the piece at exhibition to create a literary text that plays with the parallel worlds inside and outside the watercolour.
Continue reading Praça Getulio Vargas
Santos M. Mateos, who defines himself as a museophage and exponaut, takes a global look at means of communication in museums, inviting us to reflect on the shift in focus that has occurred in recent years.
Continue reading Getting Museums in Tune with Their Visitors
Fifty years ago this May, the exhibition Miró, the Other was held at the Catalonia Architects’ Association (or COAC according to its Catalan acronym), the first exhibition of Joan Miró’s work to expound and demonstrate its militant facet.
In this blog, we reproduce an article by Cristian Cirici, published years ago in the “Traços” section of the e-magazine Carnet, which outlines the origins of the project.
Continue reading ORIM
Lina Bo Bardi Drawing is an exhibition about the architect’s deep sense of connection with drawing. For her, drawing was more than a designer’s tool; it was a primary expressive means driven by a strong sense of curiosity and doubt. In the following article, the architect and exhibition curator Olga Subirós shares some of her memories to offer us a closer look at Lina Bo Bardi’s work.
Continue reading Rock, Paper, Circus
Until 20 January, and coinciding with the Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain show, the Hèlia Dones women’s collective is offering Signs of Identity, an exhibition of self-portraits. The project came out of a long process of introspection and learning; the result is both therapeutic and liberating.
Continue reading Only Yes Means Yes. Gazes by Resilient Women
Fascinated by both her character and her work, Leila Méndez, a self-taught photographer living in Barcelona, provides us with a multiple portrait of the different facets of Lee Miller. In just a few shots, Méndez captures the essence of the surrealist artist and of other photographers who, like Miller, experienced the vulnerability and the power that you feel in front of a camera, posing as a professional model.
Continue reading The Future was Female
In this article, Dolors Bramon, a historian with a PhD in Semitic languages, takes a historical look at the conflict between different cultures in Spain inaccurately referred to as convivencia. The author questions the honesty of the meaning of multiculturalism and underscores the need for repairing historical injustices. As in Kader Attia’s work, for Dolors Bramon scars are cries against oblivion.
Continue reading Scars and Reparations
The auca is a literary genre of humble proportions, yet deeply rooted in Catalan popular culture. “We must find poetry that moves us, there in the most modest of things”, said Miró. On the occasion of the project Beehave, and coinciding with the intervention La Grieta by Alfonso Borragán, Jordi Sunyer and Oriol Canosa have proposed The Ballad of El Clot de la Mel (‘Honey Hollow’), an auca with an informal tone that defends the importance of urban apiculture.
Jordi Sunyer (illustration) and Oriol Canosa (text) are creators working in the field of children’s literature. Together they have published La casa del professor Kürbis (Baula), Apa, et penses que ens ho creurem? (Cruïlla) and EicTu XicMano, el pirata del Delta (Pebre Negre).
Continue reading The Ballad of El Clot de la Mel (‘Honey Hollow’)
Rosa Maria Malet is leaving. In September, the Board of Trustees of the Fundació Joan Miró appointed Marko Daniel as the new director. The farewell party that the Fundació held last July for the woman who had been at the helm of the institution during the past 37 years was not a farewell to a position, but to a person: to Rosa Maria, to her character, to her way of being and of doing things. Many media outlets and numerous journalists have featured her in their spaces and interviews over the past few months. Isidre Estévez, a journalist friend and a person with close, long-standing ties to the Fundació, had a chance to hold a very personal interview with her.
Continue reading Malet is Leaving, but Rosa Maria Is Here to Stay. A Nuanced Farewell
From Le Corbusier’s sketches for a monumental ziggurat-museum in Geneva (Mundaneum, 1929) to urban development plans for cities like New York in the 1920s, Mesopotamian forms have had a profound impact on modern visual and architectural culture in the West.
As part of the Sumer and the Modern Paradigm exhibition, the archaeologist and researcher Maria Gabriella Micale explores how twentieth-century architecture was influenced by the drawings of the pioneers of archaeology, reinterpreting and recasting the architecture of the ancient Near East in the design of modern buildings.
Continue reading The Fate of Mesopotamian Architecture in the Spiral of Image Reproduction
Lately, an unusual garden has been growing at the Fundació Joan Miró – a garden designed by the artist Pep Vidal for bees and other insect pollinators, providing them with a pace of their own, without boundaries or conditions. Inspired by this project, Vicky Benítez, a Fine Arts graduate and professional gardener, offers us a nostalgic look at a lost, denatured world, dominated by the artifice of gardens that are organized according to primarily aesthetic criteria. Vicky Benítez proposes that we tend our gardens with a full awareness that we are not tending the body, but rather the soul; and she stresses the importance of urban vegetable gardens as spaces for social cohesion where nature (both human and non-human) can grow and develop freely.
Continue reading Gardens Don’t Exist; They’re An Illusion
On the occasion of the exhibition The Way Things Do, which celebrates the 30th anniversary of Fischli and Weiss’s iconic filmThe Way Things Go at the Fundació Joan Miró, Ivan Pintor looks at the way the Swiss duo’s film and the works by the young artists taking part in the exhibition connect with the comic strip and cinema tradition.
Ivan Pintor holds a PhD in Audiovisual Communication from Pompeu Fabra University and specialises in comparative cinema, audiovisual narrative and the history of the comic strip. In his article, Pintor investigates how chain reactions, constant motion and technological complexity have been addressed from Rube Goldberg’s cartoons and the weekly comic TBO to slapstick and science fiction films.
Continue reading The Way We Are Made
On the occasion of the Éluard, Cramer, Miró – À toute épreuve, more than a book exhibition, Dolors R. Roig examines the creative process behind the book by Joan Miró based on a collection of poems by Paul Éluard, explaining how Miró ventured beyond illustration and how the collaborative project led to new poems. While reviewing this creative adventure, her article addresses the way in which Éluard’s and Miró’s imaginations merged.
Dolors R. Roig holds a PhD in Art History and specializes in modern and contemporary art. She is responsible for art research and programming at Galeria Mayoral and teaches at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, where she was involved in the Joan Miró: An Artist Who Defined a Century MOOC and the Miró Studies Postgraduate Diploma.
Continue reading À toute épreuve and the Art of Language
The foyer at the Fundació, devoted to amateur photography, is currently the venue for the Joaquim Gomis exhibition titled Brossa at La Ricarda and will soon feature From a Pixel a Poem, by Cloe Masotta, as part of Epicentre Brossa, an activities programme centred on the life and work of Joan Brossa, the poet and visual artist who transformed contemporary Catalan culture.
Cloe Masotta, a film critic and professor who handles film programming for museums and cultural centres, has completed a research project on Joan Brossa as part of the Independent Studies Programme at the MACBA Museum in Barcelona. Here she tells us about her immersion into Brossa’s world and describes the sequence of coincidences through which the poet worked his way into her life.
Continue reading Meeting Joan Brossa
The explanation is as follows: to consider a risk involves calculating. It’s true that this is probably determined by the verb to consider, but it is no less true that the noblest of things (in Montaigne’s terms) tend to deprecate risk. They don’t ‘consider’ it. Or not much. Risk in art is nothing in itself. At the most, it is a subsidiary element to other deeper things, by no means an ultimate goal. Does risk really mean anything at all in art? Isn’t risk simply a token of what we had previously been determined to do?
Continue reading The Curse of Saying
Art requires our attention and our effort, like chess, for which we may know the basic rules, but if we are to truly enjoy it, we need to have experience – some form of training –, commitment, and an open attitude towards the infinite paths it can open up before us.
Continue reading The Challenge of Thinking
‘I play chess day and night. I like painting less and less,’ stated Marcel Duchamp in 1923 after finishing one of his great works, Le Grand Verre (The Large Glass). It is impossible to separate the painter from the chess player, because Duchamp’s art was always in check, and he viewed this mental sport as a source of creativity.
Continue reading Art in Check: Passion and Obsession