Joan Miro Artwork at Surovek Gallery

The Museum of Modern Art is closing for a few months in order to expand and create new galleries and new spaces for performance art. MoMA was founded in 1929, and has been evolving with the times. The final exhibit, before the temporary closing, was Joan Miro: Birth of the World, symbolizing a new beginning.

Miro painted Birth of the World in 1925. The spontaneous background juxtaposed behind the carefully executed symbols were revelatory for the time. As his work, and career, progressed, Miro created a unique style. “Rather than setting out to paint something,” Miro said, “I began painting and as I paint, the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself under my brush…The first stage is free, unconscious. The second stage is carefully calculated.”

The Miro exhibit, as well as the museum itself, closed on June 15th. MoMA will hold events around the city during the summer and will re-open on October 21st.

Joan Miro in Quebec

It’s been thirty years since a Joan Miro exhibit has been seen in Quebec. Miro in Mallorca: A Free Spirit is on display at the Musee National des Beaux-arts du Quebec, the exhibit’s only North American venue.

The exhibit pays tribute to the work that Miro did when he settled on the Spanish island of Mallorca, where he lived for 27 years. Miro’s grandson, Joan Punyet Miro, visited Quebec and reminisced about his grandfather, “He was a man who always had this way of working that was free, compared to the academicism of the time. With a dreamlike painting, he wanted to detach himself from the others.”

The nearly 200 paintings, sculptures and paper works on display were done between 1956 through 1981, Miro’s mature period, before his death in 1983. Miro in Mallorca: A Free Spirit will be at the Musee National des Beaux-arts du Quebec through September 8, 2019.

Joan Miro’s Legacy

Each year the Joan Miro Foundation, based in Barcelona, Miro’s birthplace, bestows the prestigious Joan Miro Prize to a worthy contemporary artist.

This year the $78,000 prize was given to Nalini Malani, the first Indian artist to win the prize. Malani was born in Karachi in 1946. Her family left Karachi during the Partition of India and sought refuge in Mumbai, where she obtained a Diploma in Fine Arts from the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in 1969.

Her paintings, films, installations and theater art reflect her compassion for those who have been forced into exile. Nalini Malani is also the first Indian artist ever to be exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Paris.