Miró and Matisse, a relationship never explored

The Miró Foun­da­tion will con­tinue with its ex­hi­bi­tions fo­cus­ing on con­tem­po­raries of the Cata­lan artist who also have their own ded­i­cated mu­se­ums. Paul Klee was the first in au­tumn 2022, in a joint pro­ject with the artist’s mu­seum in Bern. The next be Henri Ma­tisse this au­tumn in what will be one of the high­lights of the sea­son, not only be­cause of the im­por­tance of the Ma­tisse name but also be­cause the re­la­tion­ship the French artist had with Miró has never be­fore been ex­plored in any ex­hi­bi­tion.

The Miró Foun­da­tion began 2024 with the tail end of an­other unique joint pro­ject with the Barcelona Pi­casso Mu­seum to com­mem­o­rate the 50th an­niver­sary last year of the death of the artis­tic ge­nius from Málaga. The Miró-Pi­casso ex­hi­bi­tion comes to a close on Feb­ru­ary 25, when the Miró Foun­da­tion will re­cover its main ex­hi­bi­tion spaces where it will re-in­stall works from its col­lec­tion, but with a change of focus to put more em­pha­sis on Miró’s “process of pro­duc­tion”, draw­ing on doc­u­men­ta­tion from the artist’s archive, says the head of con­ser­va­tion, Teresa Mon­taner, who con­firms that the new main ex­hi­bi­tion will be un­veiled around Easter.

The new se­ries of tem­po­rary ex­hi­bi­tions will begin in May, with the in­au­gu­ra­tion of the first solo ex­hi­bi­tion in Spain of Viet­namese-Amer­i­can artist Tuan An­drew Nguyen, win­ner of the 8th edi­tion of the Joan Miró Prize. Born in Saigon in 1976 and raised in the US after the Viet­nam War, Nguyen is a ris­ing star in art today and at the foun­da­tion will pre­sent a se­ries of sculp­tures in­spired by Amer­i­can artist Alexan­der Calder’s mo­biles, which he cre­ated with frag­ments of bombs from the con­flict. Cu­rated by Mar­tina Millà, the ex­hi­bi­tion can be vis­ited until Sep­tem­ber 24.

A month later, on Oc­to­ber 24, the gallery on Mon­tjuïc will host (until Feb­ru­ary 9, 2025) Miró and Ma­tisse: be­yond im­ages, a joint pro­ject with the French artist’s mu­seum in Nice, which will show the ex­hi­bi­tion first in June. While Ma­tisse was much older than Miró and they are as­so­ci­ated with dif­fer­ent art move­ments, the for­mer Fau­vism and the lat­ter Sur­re­al­ism, “they had an ad­mi­ra­tion for each other”, says Véronique Dupas, co­or­di­na­tor of the ex­hi­bi­tion, which will be cu­rated by the foun­da­tion’s di­rec­tor Marko Daniel, act­ing di­rec­tor of the Musée Ma­tisse Aymeric Jeudy, and art his­to­rian Rémi Labrusse. The doc­u­men­ta­tion that links the two artists, much of it un­pub­lished until now, is abun­dant and in­cludes, for ex­am­ple, the re­flec­tions that Ma­tisse shared with the poet Louis Aragon on the artists who most in­ter­ested him: “Miró... yes, Miró... be­cause, re­gard­less of what he rep­re­sents on a can­vas..., if at a given point there is a red spot placed, you can be sure that it was there, and nowhere else, where it was meant to be... Re­move it, and the paint­ing falls.”

The sea­son is com­pleted with a se­ries of ex­hi­bi­tions from emerg­ing artist’s in the Espai 13 ex­hi­bi­tion space, which will cel­e­brate its 45th an­niver­sary. Irina Mutt will cu­rate We will keep each other com­pany when it grows dark), which be­tween Feb­ru­ary and Jan­u­ary next year will fea­ture work by Alba Mayol, Inari Sandell, Danielle Brath­waite-Shirley and He­lena Vi­nent.

Mean­while, until March 24, the gallery has the ex­hi­bi­tion that began in Sep­tem­ber: Joan Miró and the script of things. Based on a works from the gallery’s col­lec­tion, it shows the evo­lu­tion of the sym­bolic lan­guage that Miró began de­vel­op­ing dur­ing the Span­ish Civil War in re­sponse to the artist’s urge to es­cape from the tragic sit­u­a­tion of the times.

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