Guggenheim Bilbao presents Joan Miró: Absolute Reality. Paris, 1920–1945

The show spans 25 years of activity, and there is a steady flow of new ideas ranging from his original magic realism to his language of constellated signals. Throughout this progression, it becomes obvious that prehistoric art, such as rock paintings, petroglyphs, and statuettes, piqued Miró’s interest, a fascination corroborated by his journals, in which he suggests returning to the dawn of art in order to reclaim its original spiritual sense.

Joan Miró’s (b. 1893 Barcelona; d. 1983 Palma) work is recognized for its stylistic innovations produced within the context of the early avant-garde movements, particularly Dadaism and Surrealism, and he is also regarded as a predecessor of Abstract Expressionism. Miró was also a spiritually minded artist who was attracted by visions and dreams. Recently, emphasis has been brought to the political aspects of his work, emphasizing his staunch opposition to Franco’s tyranny and admiration for the period’s Catalan nationalism. Some of his ideas, such as his statement of the “assassination of painting” in the late 1920s, remain intriguing and allude to an attitude that foreshadowed Conceptual Art. Forty years after his death, in short, his oeuvre still interests and fascinates us while remaining just as enigmatic as ever.

Miró’s work is a model mythopoetic endeavour, a never-ending transformation of real experience into art. As vehemently as he opposed traditional realism, Miró also rejected pure abstraction, claiming that all of the signs he painted on his paintings corresponded to something substantial and anchored in a profound reality that is part of reality itself. This concept is related to a term by poet and Surrealist movement leader André Breton, who spoke of a new absolute reality in which the inner worlds of artists and poets were merged into the outward world. Yet, Miró’s favorite artist, Paul Klee, described his own work as “abstract but with memories,” implying that in art, the real is the real altered by memory. In statements made to Cahiers d’Art in 1939, Miró affirmed: “If we don’t try to discover the religious essence or the magical sense of things, we shall do no more than add new causes of degradation to those already surrounding people today.”