(Montroig near Barcelona 1893–1983 Palma de Mallorca)

Painting. 1953.

Oil on canvas.

Signed lower right: Miró. Signed, dated and titled on the reverse: Miró 1953 Painting.

20 × 150 cm.

Provenance:
- Galerie Maeght, Paris.
- Swiss property.

Literature:
- Jacques Dupin and Ariane Lelong-Mainaud: Joan Miró, Catalogue raisonné, Drawings, vol. III: 1960–1972, Paris 2012, p. 218, no. 945 (with ill.).
- Jacques Dupin: Miró, Flammarion, Paris 1961, p. 547, no. 826.

The older Miró became, the more daring he grew in his painting. He would incorporate a scratch, a defect, a drop or a splash onto his canvases, which became larger and more experimental. In a pursuit to achieve maximal intensity through minimal means, the void gained increasing importance. The forms, reduced to their simplest expression, were not abstract in his understanding — they owed everything to nature, the source of their inspiration. By 1927 he had made the famous statement that he wanted to "murder painting". As a part of this endeavour, Miró not only experimented with form but also with materiality throughout his life and delighted in working in particularly large formats. The 2015/16 exhibition “Joan Miró – Mauer, Fries, Wandbild” at the Kunsthaus Zurich beautifully demonstrated the importance of these large formats. Miró strove to move from a simple representation of reality to an equalisation of the picture surface with the wall. A crucial starting point is the 1921/22 work "The Farm (La Ferme)", in which the painter captured the material properties of the house wall with meticulous accuracy. It is a beautiful, representational example that shows the significance that the physical, haptic quality held for Miró in his works.

For Miró it was not fundamentally about abstraction, but rather the self-reference of the work itself. The resulting reinterpretation and consolidation of signs in his paintings function in a similar way to that of poetry. Joan Miró's significant influence to Abstract Expressionism in the United States, which became the most important art movement after the Second World War, has been rightly noted.

Created in 1952, the painting offered here belongs to a group of large, narrow friezes on which seemingly floating, uninterpretable signs and symbols are playfully lined up side by side on monochrome grounds, perhaps modelled on ancient scrolls. Jacques Dupin believes that some of these paintings are among the artist’s best and most beautiful.