My Art Museum opens retrospective on Spanish artist Joan Miró

Arts & Design

Published: 08 May. 2022, 14:05

My Art Museum opens retrospective on Spanish artist Joan Miró

″Woman with a Beautiful Hat, Star″ (1978) by Joan Miró [MY ART MUSEUM]

The late Spanish artist Joan Miró (1893-1983) often depicted women, birds and stars in his paintings and sculptures. Using a wide palette of bright colors and a mixture of symbolic motifs with cosmologic elements, his artworks were based on an imagination that was out of this world.

A retrospective of Miró, titled “Joan Miró: Women, Birds, Stars,” is currently on view at the My Art Museum in Gangnam District, southern Seoul. Around 70 pieces were loaned by Fundació Joan Miró, a museum dedicated to Miró in Barcelona.

Many of Miró’s works are about freedom and spontaneity, as shown in his illustrations of birds. As opposed to snakes — which due to their nature of crawling on the ground typically symbolize the secular world — birds fly unrestrictedly and therefore are capable of “connecting” humans to a Utopia-like world.

“The simplest things give me ideas. A plate that a peasant eats his soup out of is much more interesting to me than the ridiculously rich plates of rich people. Folk art moves me. In this art there are no tricks, there is no fakery. It goes straight to the heart of things. It surprises, and it is so rich with possibilities,” Miró said in an interview in 1959.

The exhibition view of ″Joan Miró: Women, Birds, Stars,″ which includes the painted bronze sculpture ″Personage″ (1967). [SHIN MIN-HEE]

Most of the interpretations of Miró’s works fall into the hands of viewers. There are no exact answers, as Miró even said himself in 1936, he creates artworks by “[feeling] attracted by a magnetic force toward an object, and then [feeling] drawn toward another object which is added to the first, and their combination creates a poetic shock.”

“Joan Miró: Women, Birds, Stars” continues until Sept. 12. My Art Museum is open every day from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tickets range from 12,000 won ($9) to 20,000 won and can be purchased on Interpark or Naver.

BY SHIN MIN-HEE [shin.minhee@joongang.co.kr]