Joan Miró Anti-Portrait Gallery

Temporary exhibitions

Dates
Curated by
Teresa Montaner

Graphic art inspired a great deal of interest in Joan Miró, overall from the 1940's on. This format offered him new technical and visual possibilities, while at the same time freeing him from his individual responsibility as an artist to commit himself to a collective activity in which other craftsmen were involved. Joan Miró Anti-Portrait Gallery wishes to highlight the artist's expertise and expressive freedom as a skilled engraver, able to obtain, through etching, aquatint or carborundum printmaking, material and gestural effects close to those of painting.

The 15 selected works show a series of characters with human, primitive and mythological attributes, which hark back to an ancestral culture and appear in the centre of compositions surrounded by heavenly symbols. With these representations, Joan Miró was able to abolish the traditional notion of portrait as mimicry.

Mambo, 1978. Etching and aquatint. Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona