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Lot Essay
Statue is one of the monumental sculptures that Joan Miró created in the final, triumphant phase of his career. Having worked predominantly in two-dimensions, over the course of the last two decades of his life he embraced sculpture as a means of furthering his distinctive artistic vision. While with painting, Miró conveyed his imaginary world of signs and forms onto the surface of the canvas, in his sculpture, he started out with the tangible reality of his material and turned these into objects fuelled and inspired by his powerful imagination.
In the present work, Miró has transformed one of his frequently appearing personnages into a totemic, monumental form. A circular shaped head stands atop a massive, rectangular plinth-like form. The artist has rendered the figure’s eyes and protruding nose, leaving no doubt that this is a portrayal of a figure.
Despite its large, ascendant scale, this work was paradoxically born from one of the artist’s ceramic pieces, titled Figurine, which he created in 1956. In the early 1950s, Miró returned to the studio of Josep Llorens Artigas, situated in the small village of Gallifa, near Barcelona, and began to work on ceramics once more. Seeking to go beyond the traditional boundaries of the medium, Miró took inspiration from the natural world that surrounded him, as well as from his own imagination. As he stated in an interview in 1951, “It is sculpture that interests me. For example: it rains, the ground gets wet, I pick up some mud—it becomes a little statuette. A pebble might determine a form for me” (quoted in “Interview with Georges Charbonnier,” 1951, in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1986, p. 221).
It was with Artigas that Miró truly realized the potential of sculpture and of working in three-dimensional form. There, Miró found an artistic paradise where he created a host of abstracted, fantastical figures and heads, as well as objects, which were transformed through the process of firing, into a living cast of characters. “They seem more powerful to me,” Miró described of his work of this time, “enriched by my experiences as a man and a painter” (quoted in R. Bernier, “Miró as Ceramicist,” in L’Oeil, Paris, May 1956, in ibid., p. 236).
While the ceramic Figurine stood at around 20cm high, Miró already had a monumental vision in mind: "I worked in a monumental spirit, dreaming about a possible connection with architecture” (ibid., p. 236). It was not until a few decades later that he fully realized this desire in the form of the present Statue, which takes on a magisterial, dominant presence as it presides powerfully over its setting.
In the present work, Miró has transformed one of his frequently appearing personnages into a totemic, monumental form. A circular shaped head stands atop a massive, rectangular plinth-like form. The artist has rendered the figure’s eyes and protruding nose, leaving no doubt that this is a portrayal of a figure.
Despite its large, ascendant scale, this work was paradoxically born from one of the artist’s ceramic pieces, titled Figurine, which he created in 1956. In the early 1950s, Miró returned to the studio of Josep Llorens Artigas, situated in the small village of Gallifa, near Barcelona, and began to work on ceramics once more. Seeking to go beyond the traditional boundaries of the medium, Miró took inspiration from the natural world that surrounded him, as well as from his own imagination. As he stated in an interview in 1951, “It is sculpture that interests me. For example: it rains, the ground gets wet, I pick up some mud—it becomes a little statuette. A pebble might determine a form for me” (quoted in “Interview with Georges Charbonnier,” 1951, in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1986, p. 221).
It was with Artigas that Miró truly realized the potential of sculpture and of working in three-dimensional form. There, Miró found an artistic paradise where he created a host of abstracted, fantastical figures and heads, as well as objects, which were transformed through the process of firing, into a living cast of characters. “They seem more powerful to me,” Miró described of his work of this time, “enriched by my experiences as a man and a painter” (quoted in R. Bernier, “Miró as Ceramicist,” in L’Oeil, Paris, May 1956, in ibid., p. 236).
While the ceramic Figurine stood at around 20cm high, Miró already had a monumental vision in mind: "I worked in a monumental spirit, dreaming about a possible connection with architecture” (ibid., p. 236). It was not until a few decades later that he fully realized this desire in the form of the present Statue, which takes on a magisterial, dominant presence as it presides powerfully over its setting.