New exhibition with works Joan Miró inaugurated in Serralves
The exhibition ‘Joan Miró and the death of painting’ is inaugurated today at the Casa de Serralves, in Porto, and it includes 11 works from the collection of the Portuguese State of the Catalan artist produced in the ’70s.
Speaking to reporters, Robert Lubar Messeri, curator of the exhibition, explained that the exhibition features the artist’s artistic production in 1973, when Miró was 80 years old, revealing “11 works of the Portuguese State collection”, as well as works of collections Spanish and French, which will be exhibited in Portugal for the first time.
In the exhibition can be burnt canvases to reveal the artist’s “aesthetic anger”, but also sculptures made with materials such as rugs and clothes, probably used by the artist to clean the studio, and which are decorated with ropes, wool or scissors.
As explained by Robert Lubar Messeri, the materials used by Miró at the time are “really very poor materials” and refer to “arte povera“, an Italian artistic movement that used unconventional materials in painting.
The new Serralves exhibition focuses on Miró’s involvement (1893-1983) in the current “anti-painting” to highlight how the tension between painting and anti-painting was transposed into the work of the Catalan artist, reaching a crescendo in March 1973, at the retrospective exhibition that took place at the Grand Palais in Paris.
The scale of the exhibition is “small,” acknowledged interim director of the museum, Marta Almeida, referring that the exhibition is a “new approach to the collection of the Portuguese State“, but more “specific” and more “focused” in the that the artist prepared a retrospective of his work in Paris.
The president of the Board of Directors of Serralves, Ana Pinho, considered that today was “a great day” for that foundation for having a new exhibition from the work of Joan Miró after in 2016 presented the exhibition ‘Joan Miró: Materiality and Metamorphosis’, which was visited by 240,000 people.
“As everyone knows, in 2016 Serralves made known by the hand of curator Robert Lubar Miró’s collection that belongs to the Portuguese state and that until that time was not known,” declared Ana Pinho, recalling that this first exhibition allowed many Portuguese to “confronted for the first time with works by Joan Miró” and was “widely visited” both in the House of Serralves, and later in the Ajuda Palace, in Lisbon, and in Padua.
The exhibition also includes a film by the Catalan photographer Francesc Catalã, which reveals the process of creation and destruction of Miró’s burnt canvases.
The exhibition can be seen until March 3, 2019, and was sponsored by Sonae.
