Joan Miró

Galerie Maeght, Paris, 1985

Emilio Fernández Miró and Pilar Ortega Chapel, Joan Miró, Sculptures. Catalogue raisonné, 1928-1982, Paris, 2006, no. 103, illustration of another cast, p. 140

Very good condition. Some stains and drip formations on face and top of head are inherent to artist's process. Minor surface dirt in crevices. Otherwise, fine.
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Miró first turned to sculpture at the end of the 1920s, and his initial works reveal the influence of the Surrealist ethos. He was particularly concerned with the creation of the "symbolic object," and his uncanny sculptures were intended to plumb the subconscious, animating repressed images and experiences from the depths of the human psyche.

The rough, unfinished surface of Figure is indicative of Miró's desire to avoid giving his works too "sculptured" a feel. This is also a legacy of the unorthodox techniques of his teacher at L'Escola de Belles Artes La Llotja, Gali Fabra. As he later commented, "Gali was a remarkable teacher, and he gave me an exercise so that I would learn to 'see' form: He blindfolded me, and placed objects in my hands, then asked me to draw the objects without having seen them. So my interest in sculpture actually dates from that time" (quoted in Joan Miro, Sculpture (exhibition catalogue), City Art Gallery, Southampton, 1990, p. 7).

Although Miró was less strictly aligned with the Surrealists when he came to create his later bronze sculptures, they preserve the spirit of the movement. The present work is a wonderful example of the artist's incongruous series of "figures" which belongs to the semi-conscious world of fantasy and dream. In fact, in later life, sculpture became the medium in which Miró felt most free to investigate the extremities of his imaginative fantasies; as he commented in his notebook in July, 1941, "It is in sculpture that I will create a truly phantasmagoric world of living monsters; what I do in painting is more conventional" (quoted in Margit Rowell, Ed., Joan Miro, Selected Writings, London, 1986, p. 175).