Unmistakably Miró

These were among the many paintings by noted Catalan artist Joan Miró which I managed to view in Barcelona over the weekend. They're really appealing, aren't they? I've always liked Miró's works, and the trip to gave me the perfect opportunity to tour the Fundació Joan Miró, a gallery and institution dedicated to his works, located in a nice hilly area overlooking the city centre.

Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893, and he took to art at a very young age. But his early compositions were conventionally realist in nature, such as this piece:

It was only in his later years that Miró formed an increasingly personalized style, moving more and more into surrealism and abstraction, as typified by the three examples at the top of this post. To me, this developmental process was similar to what his near contemporary from the Netherlands Piet Mondrian went through. But whereas Mondrian located art in the form of straight black lines at right angles, Miró's style was much more expressive and free flowing, although both displayed a penchant for using bright primary colours.

In Miró's art, you typically see a bland single-tone background, with no depth and no sense of perspective. There are certain recurrent elements, such as representations of birds, insects, faces and even individual letters, all rendered with a whimsical, almost childlike playfulness. But they all stemmed from the hands of a true master - someone able to translate visually a dreamlike world we can only imagine. And with rare exceptions, the sense you get from is works is that of charm, innocence and fun.

In his later years, Miró experimented with other media, such as sculpture and textile-making, examples of which were also displayed at the museum. I certainly enjoyed myself thoroughly, so let me end with two more examples of his works - or what I'd call "Paintings I'd like to hang in my bathroom if I were rich enough":