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
In 1918, Joan Miró painted a portrait of his friend Heribert Casany. Berta Jardí rescues Heribert from oblivion in her novel L’home del barret (Univers, 2019) and reveals the story behind the painting.
For the Fundació’s blog, the author gives her account of the painting’s extraordinary journey since Miró painted it until it was finally shown at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Its wanderings are surrounded by horses and automobiles, mysteriously connected to the life of the man in the portrait.
Continue reading Horses and Automobiles
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
Susana Carnicero graduated in Fine Arts and holds a post-graduate degree in Miró studies. Her fascination with colour as matter is the point of departure for a personal, subjective description in which a blue spot against a white background leads her on an exploration of the symbolism of this colour through a variety of artists.
Continue reading Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves
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
Like the force fields that keep particles together in atoms, the apparently distant connections between narratives and individuals sometimes converge in similar reflections. Such is the case of the random encounter of isolation, the main subject of the exhibition program The Possibility of an Island, with the thread of thoughts that Agustín Fernández Mallo subtly weaves in this new article for our blog.
Agustín Fernández Mallo, a physicist and writer based in Palma de Mallorca and the author of the Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience and Nocilla Lab trilogy, among other works, is part of the current contemporary literature and art scene. His latest novel has been published in Spanish as Trilogía de la guerra.
Continue reading The (Im)possibility of an Island
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’)
To speak of architecture is to speak of spaces and volumes, of building components and of light. But how can you draw light? Those are the questions that Cristina Masanés raises in this article which – without intending to unveil the metaphor – tells us about an intimate and poetic walk through the geometries of the Fundació Joan Miró and other buildings designed by the architect Josep Lluís Sert.
Cristina Masanés, who studied philosophy, has written for a variety of media and art centres. She works as a freelance journalist, documentalist and exhibition curator.
Continue reading ‘Che bella voce.’ Architecture, Voice and Speech
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
In the 1990s, the French critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud laid the groundwork for the concept of relational art in his essay Esthétique relationnelle (Les presses du réelle, 1998). According to Bourriaud, the work of art is now presented ‘as a “duration” that must be experienced, as an invitation to unlimited dialogue.’
Following this approach, which emphasizes the viewer’s relationship to the art object, Jordi J. Clavero, the head of the Fundació Joan Miró’s Education Department, considers the concept of a work of art and its constant mutation as it is experienced first-hand by each one of its viewers.
Continue reading The Perplexed Object
LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) is an example of a museum that opened up to young people and to its local community, giving priority to collective experimentation and learning. Its Arts for NexGen project has had a major impact on a highly diverse social environment.
Cultural manager, fundraiser and independent consultant Anna Fabra felt particularly drawn to this endeavour. She lives in Los Angeles and is a regular visitor to the museum. Above and beyond her experience as a user, she has chosen to delve further into the reasons for the project’s success and consider how a similar experience could be carried over to Barcelona.
Continue reading Art for the Next Generation
The artist Antoni Hervàs received a commission from the Fundació Joan Miró to design a family workshop based on the theme of self-organization as part of the exhibition with the same title curated by Antonio Ortega, which provides an overview of DIY art practices from the 1960s until the present.
Hervàs tells us about the process of conceiving and creating the SpaceFest (La festa espacial) and the connection between the activity and self-organized practices, from the original idea to the implementation of the workshop with its participants. The SpaceFest is one of the most recent events in the line of family activities created by artists at the Fundació.
Continue reading The SpaceFest
‘Have you ever dreamed about Miró?’ The first question that the participants from Susoespai asked us sounded easy enough to answer and not particularly awkward; however, it shook the invisible threads that had the potential to bind us together. The Cruïlles project offered an opportunity to be involved in a joint participatory experience: an exchange of letters written between members of the Fundació staff and participants from Susoespai.
Continue reading Cruïlles, Crossroads: A Correspondence
Miró didn’t discuss painting, because he said he wasn’t interested in it. To him, painting was a vehicle of expression for the spirit, which is the only thing of interest. As I see it, Wikipedia – as an encyclopaedia – is also just a tool, a tool that allows me to share information with the greatest possible number of people, focusing on the ultimate goal of collaborating to shape the critical spirit of mature citizens who question the world they live in.
Continue reading Miró the Wikipedian