JOAN MIRÓ (1893-1983)

Miró’s ceramics were the product of his close relationship with Joseph Llorens Artigas, a highly skilled master-potter and Miró’s long-time collaborator in ceramics and pottery. Their friendship blossomed as students in Barcelona and later in Paris, where they both moved in the 1920s and where their paths often crossed and overlapped as they each forged their artistic careers. Their long and highly productive collaboration in ceramics began towards the end of the Second World War as both found themselves once again in Spain. Between 1953 and 1956, in Artigas’s ceramics studio in a country village north of Barcelona, the two embarked on a series that would result in 238 ceramic pieces. Miró, intrigued by the peculiarities of ceramics as a medium and inspired by the rugged Catalan landscape, created a clay world of forms and symbols made up of plates, carved plaques, eggs, vases, figures, and elements resembling rocks and stones. The textures, enamels, and the uncertainty of the result allowed Miró to explore new creative avenues, opening his highly personal artistic language to new possibilities. His familiar themes enter new worlds and submit to the ceramic’s materiality. Along with the texture of the medium and the union of line and tangible space, the colour and substance serve to recapture the primitive resonance of his lines and birth a living, breathing head.