A GREAT POETRY, VERY COLORFUL

 This exhibition presents to the public for the first time the complete Gaudí engraved series, a remarkable set of twenty-one engravings acquired by the museum between 2003 and 2022. With great poetry, very colorful and particularly joyful, this series allows us to appreciate the late work of Miró in the field of engraving, but also to explore the links that united these two great Catalan artists, Miró and Gaudí, both symbols of Barcelona.

 A particularly prolific artist, the "international Catalan" Joan Miró, as he liked to define himself, created a very personal plastic work, outside the great pictorial movements of his time, although he was first associated with artists surreal.

 In the 1930s, he invented his own pictorial universe, made up of imaginary shapes and symbols, between figuration and abstraction. His palette, with very bright colors, is largely dominated by blue. Forms and signs characterize his plastic expression. From the 1940s, he tried new techniques including engraving, sculpture and weaving, and displayed a monumental body of work, which met with great success in Europe and the United States.

 His admiration for the work of the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852 – 1926) began in his childhood in Barcelona. Joan Miró is impressed by the extravagant and colossal Sagrada Familia, whose construction began in 1882, and by the very original and colorful Parc Guëll, two monuments that today make up the identity and the pride of Barcelona.

 The two men met in 1910, when Gaudí was already a recognized architect and Miró was just beginning his career. Antoni Gaudí, after his death in 1926, fell into oblivion a few years before being rehabilitated in the 1950s as one of the great figures in the history of contemporary architecture.

•  A series engraved in tribute

It was in the 1970s, when Miró was approaching 80, that he produced several series engraved in the studio of Joan Barbara, his thirty-year-old companion whom he met in Paris in 1957. It was then that he created the Gaudí series, between 1975 and 1979, in order to pay homage to the genius Catalan architect, who, like him, never hesitated to show great freedom and a certain audacity in his creation.

 This series of 21 engravings, of different sizes and using several techniques, was printed in only 50 copies in the workshop of Joan Barbarà in Barcelona. Miró represents imaginary forms, with complex and dynamic colors, and a world of signs, so characteristic of his work since the 1940s. Stars, spots or "cives", collages of newspaper, come together to create a very poetic set. In addition to its beauty and plastic strength, this series also has the merit of bringing together these two great Catalan artists, universally recognized today.

 Miró, a major Spanish artist of the 20th century, entered the collections of the Goya Museum in 2003, during an exhibition that the museum had dedicated to him. The first boards of the Gaudí series were then acquired over the years and market opportunities. Only one was missing, plate XVII, which the museum has just acquired, thus completing the original series.

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