Moneo building
Espai Estrella
L'edifici Moneo, seu actual de la Miró Mallorca Fundació, es va inaugurar el 1992. Projectat per l'arquitecte Rafael Moneo és el resultat de la donació de Pilar Juncosa, vídua de Miró, a la Ciutat de Palma.
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Exhibition space
- Espai Estrella
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Dates
- 3 December 2014 — 3 June 2016
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Inauguration
- 3 December 2014
- 00:00
Joan Miró. The light of the night. Works from the 1960s and 70s
In The Light of the Night, the book the exhibition borrows its title from, the great essayist Pietro Citati discusses some of the great myths in world history. Citati describes how many ancient authors from different cultures referred to a swift and lambent light, the light of the night, that inflames men’s souls in a flash of blessedness; precisely at this moment, men believe they accede to divine things.
Joan Miró (Barcelona, 1893 – Palma de Mallorca, 1983), who was described by his friend Sir Roland Penrose as the Lord of the Night, created an unforgettable visual mythology of his own, in which the main characters are the night, visions and dreams, stars and constellations, as well as strange birds and particular women. This subject already appeared in his works from the 1920s, and was very frequent in the 1930s and 40s; he went back to it again, although not exclusively, in the last decades of his life, when he created the pieces displayed here. His oeuvre is deeply spiritual and revolutionary in formal terms, and was key, for instance, in the development of 1950s American painting (Gorky, Pollock, de Kooning, etc.).
This exhibition shows around forty works, among which rarely seen paintings, a large-format tapestry and a large group of bronze sculptures, in which Miró explores the evocative power of objects. The paintings prove that Miró continued to explore the possibilities of several materials throughout his life, painting on plastic, zinc, canvas, cardboard or Masonite. In these paintings black is the dominant color, with its nocturnal connotations; the canvasses are filled with heads and characters, as well as women and birds. Miró’s symbolic world is ambiguous, even though it is revealed by means of these lyrical images that pay homage to the night as a threshold of poetic or artistic mystery.
