Joan Miro’s Mallorca Studio Recreated In New London Exhibition

“My dream, once I am able to settle down somewhere, is to have a very large studio” – Joan Miró, 1938

A new exhibition marking 60 years since the founding of Joan Miró’s studio in Mallorca is celebrated at Mayoral in London. The show will recreate Miró’s atelier as part of the programme. Curated by Elvira Cámara, and produced in collaboration with historian Joan Punyet Miró, the artist’s grandson.

The exhibition will include 25 paintings and drawings by the artist and bringing together a wealth of historical and archive material, Miró’s studio presents an immersive environment evoking the poetic universe of the artist’s atelier. Complete with furniture, painting materials and household items, the recreation offers visitors real insight into the everyday working life of the leading avant-garde painter.

The Mallorca studio was hugely influential and integral to Miró’s creative output, as Joan Punyet Miró, the artist’s grandson, explains: “The Studio offered Miró a suitable working environment. When he closed the door behind him he knew he was cutting all contact with the outside world and entering into his imaginary universe. This imaginary space, his reality, was arranged upon a background of Mediterranean light, colours and shapes…” 

Having lived in different locations in Europe throughout his life, often in different places at the same time in Paris and Spain, he finally settled in Mallorca in 1956, where he had taken his family during the Second World War. The studio in Mallorca became a refuge for Miró and he would work, unrelentingly, from the Mallorca studio for over quarter of a century, until his death in 1983.

Founded sixty years ago in 1956, the studio was designed by Miró’s close friend the well-known Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert, who would design the Miró Foundation in Barcelona twenty years later in 1976. Working from exile in New York, Sert corresponded with Miró on the design of the workshop through a series of letters. These important documents are included in a second space of the exhibition, where visitors can learn more about the extraordinary artistic output of the studio through archive imagery and the personal effects of the artist.

Elvira Cámara, Curator of Miro’s studio and Director of The Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró in Mallorca explains the motives behind bringing this unique show to London, “the Sert Studio bears witness to the artist’s final creative stage, which saw the culmination of his brilliant human and artistic process, something we wanted to bring to a London audience with the Mayoral exhibition Miró’s studio.” 

 

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