Joan Miró
(1893-1983)
Joan Miró was born April 20, 1893 in Barcelona. After attending business school, Miró shifted his focus to art, making his first trip to Paris in 1920, meeting Picasso and participating in the Dada movement. Soon after, Miró joined the Surrealist group, exhibiting paintings, sculptures, and ceramics, leading him to the international acclaim and ever-growing art historical significance he holds today. With a museum dedicated to his work in his native city of Barcelona, the Fundació Joan Miró was established in 1975, celebrating the artist’s renowned career and innovative oeuvre. With influences ranging from folk art and church frescoes to 17th- century Dutch realism, Miró’s Surrealist exploration of pictorial space reveals the artist’s signature semi-abstract objects, biomorphic forms, and geometric shapes. Miró’s carefully rendered works aim to dismantle traditional means of representation, which has served as inspiration for generations of artists to follow.
Miró’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and internationally. His first major museum retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1941. His works have been included in thousands of exhibitions and are in the permanent collection of many art institutions in the United States and abroad, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Tate Modern, London, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Fundació Joan Miró among many others. Miró was awarded the Venice Biennale Grand Prize for Graphic Work in 1954, the 1958 Guggenheim International Award, and the 1980 Gold Medal of Fine Arts in Spain.
