- Dates
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Joan Miró: Gaudí Series
Joan Miró coincided with Antoni Gaudí as a young man in the model drawing sessions at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc in Barcelona, and although they never met in person, Miró always expressed great admiration for Gaudí’s work, particularly his spirit of risk-taking and improvisation.
When Joan Miró and the ceramist Josep Llorens Artigas were commissioned to create the UNESCO murals in Paris in the 1950s, they sought inspiration from prehistoric and Romanesque art as well as Gaudí’s architecture. A visit to Park Güell in Barcelona gave Miró the strength and atmosphere he needed to begin the decisive phase of the project.
Henceforth, Gaudí became a source of reference for Miró, especially in the production of ceramics. By the mid-1970s, in recognition of this influence, Miró decided to pay tribute to him with a series of engravings entitled Gaudí. With the help of Joan Barbarà, he began working on them in the engraving workshop he had set up in Son Boter, Palma de Mallorca.
The Gaudí series consists of twenty-one engravings of various sizes, in which Miró fearlessly explores how to transcend the possibilities of the engraving technique. He combines etching, sugar aquatint and embossing with torn paper collages. A series of fantastic figures that are structured by the graphics of blacks and chequered colours, with a clear insistence on curved, undulating lines, recalling the fragmented ceramic mosaics of Park Güell.
Joan Barbarà printed these engravings in Barcelona in 1979. He made an edition of 65 copies on Arches paper, signed and numbered from 1 to 50 and from I to XV. The edition was published by the Galeria Maeght in Barcelona.
