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Property Sold to Benefit The Yorkshire Sculpture Park

From the Catalogue:
In the 1940’s, following a major retrospective of his work, Joan Miró embarked on a perennial journey of sculptural discovery, which would grow to become as prominent and important to Miró’s artistic oeuvre as his paintings. Miró’s exploration into the tangible realm of sculpture enabled him to expand beyond the confines of the two-dimensional picture plane, such that he could finally construct, and truly immerse himself in, a mystical world beyond the limitations of the canvas, a seemingly natural progression for the artist.

The present works are three-dimensional representations of the recurring oneiric forms that lurk amongst the artist’s paintings. Miró’s incorporation of these archetypal themes and figures within his sculpture - namely the familiar tear-drop shaped negative space of Femme sur la place d’un cimetière, and Maternité’s unmistakable abstract figuration of the female form - confirms that, perhaps subconsciously, his paintings constitute the foundation of his distinctive sculptural language. The Catalan artist recognised an organic evolution in his sculptural development: ‘my vocabulary of forms… did not come to me all at once. It formulated itself almost in spite of me’ (Joan Miró, quoted in Peter Murray CBE, 'Miró: Sculptor at Yorkshire Sculpture Park', Miró: Sculptor, West Bretton, 2012, p. 5). The preliminary sketches and earlier ceramic casts of the present works were produced, in some cases, decades before the bronze sculptures were created, and with each piece narrating Miró’s innovative, meticulous yet unconventional approach to sculpture-making, the works are more than purely idiosyncratic compositions: each character reveals elements of the whimsical world that Miró envisaged.

Miró’s sculptures demonstrate the inextricable influence of his fellow Surrealists, and artists within the Dada movement, on his own artistic outcomes. Much like Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and the assemblages associated with the Dada artist’s, Miró’s sculptures are bronze casts of figures born of quotidian objects and materials, encouraging a comprehensible and inclusive dialogue between the artist and any viewer, while simultaneously capturing the energy of each object.
—Courtesy of Phillips

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