This exhibition presents a selection of photograph deposited by Enric Tormo Freixes in the archive of the Fundació Joan Miró. They are all photographs taken in the 1940s and 1950s, portraying Miró in his family and professional contexts, whether in Barcelona, in Mont-Roig or in working trips to Paris.
Grounded in the proposition of continuing to address the diverse questions affecting emerging art, for its 2022 programme the Espai 13 of the Fundació Joan Miró presents Dive and Immersion, an exhibition series curated by Pere Llobera, with artistic proposals by Victor Jaenada, Marcel Rubio Juliana, Marria Pratts and Martín Vitaliti.
The Point of Sculpture offers an overview of the practice of modern and contemporary sculpture from an asynchronous, heterogeneous perspective that also includes older pieces and anonymous objects. The exhibition, arising from the ambition of twentieth-century sculpture to move beyond representing and generating images, also aims to show the major transformation of this discipline in the twenty-first century with the implementation of new techniques and the emergence of new imaginaries and sensibilities.
Between 2006 and 2009, the years leading up to the global financial crisis, Juande Jarillo (Granada, 1969) spent his free time seeking out moments of people gathering together or crossing paths in Barcelona. Jarillo set up his camera in different locations in the city centre, sometimes riding the tourist bus, and waiting for the precise moment when a conjunction of forms, an interplay of gazes and reflections, or a composition of figures or of urban artefacts would unfold. His aim was to capture the almost invisible textures, light and vectors that cross the urban landscape at a given moment.
The exhibition Shared Studios. Three Case Studies presents the work, production, and learning dynamics that arise in shared studio spaces among artists in the Barcelona art scene.
The exhibition Broken Games is a selection of 13 photographs by different authors: some were taken by Joaquim Gomis’ father, others by Joaquim Gomis (1902-1991) himself, and one by Gomis’ wife, Odette Cherbonnier. What prompted this exhibition was a desire to present materials from the family albums in the Gomis Archive held at the National Archive of Catalonia, which evoke summertime joie de vivre as well as fun vacation and leisure time.
Miró-ADLAN: An Archive of Modernity (1932-1936) reconstructs the key role of the group of artists and intellectual known as ADLAN (Amics de l’Art Nou [Friends of New Art]) in introducing modernity to the Barcelona of the 1930s, during the years of the Spanish Republic. While in major European cities avant-garde movements had the support of critics and collectors, here modernity needed the impetus of an enthusiastic group that sought to regenerate Catalan culture and adopted Joan Miró as its leader in the promotion of new art.
In this selection of photographs-most of which convey low temperatures, were taken at dusk or at times of low luminosity-, we find elements that can both open or close a space or dissolve its boundaries and contours. Mayoral photographs places that might seem hostile, places where time has been suspended, a time that does not seem to exist and that the locations do not allow to situate or signify.
This selection of photographs by Joaquim Gomis captures a historic and personal moment of suspended time and a sense of emptiness, of collective post-traumatic shock, of phantoms and absences, of dejection and very slow reconstruction. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, new collective confrontations were erupting which were often the result of the dismantling of European ’empires’ and the beginning of the Cold War. Coinciding with the solo exhibition of Nalini Malani (born in Karachi, Undivided India, in 1946) at Fundació Joan Miró, we delved into Gomis’ archive to find photographs from those two years that would convey the prevailing mood in Catalonia right at the moment when what was known as British India was declaring its independence. A declaration that came with a territorial partition that brought about a wave of sectarian violence that, like in Spain, left a legacy that still needs reckoning and reconciliation.
The Indian artist Nalini Malani, the winner of the 2019 Joan Miró Prize, presents a selection of works from her entire career, in which feminist thought and the condemnation of violence are ever-present.
The artist Antoni Llena presents a large constellation of drawings by Joan Miró that fills an entire room in the permanent collection section. Llena’s selection, comprising 150 pieces from the Fundació’s holdings, includes drawings which are at the root of Miró’s most renowned works and others which the artist repeated for years without ever actually developing them into paintings. In the case of this constellation, Llena’s work is the selection itself.
In the late 1970s, after Franco died, Barcelona photographer Antoni Bernad took portraits of the leading personalities in Catalan culture from Joan Miró’s generation.
