Joan Miró (1893–1983) was a Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist who is celebrated for his vibrant, symbolic works that combine whimsical, dreamlike qualities with abstraction. He was born in Barcelona to a watchmaker and a goldsmith who insisted that their artistic son study business and work in an office. Miró followed orders, working for two years as a clerk, but was hobbled by severe depression and typhoid. He convalesced in Montroig, near Tarragona, Spain, and in 1912 was permitted to enroll in art school at La Lonja’s Escuela Superior de Artes Industriales y Bellas Artes in Barcelona. Miró would later split his time between Barcelona, Montroig, and Mallorca, drawing inspiration from his surroundings for the landscapes, portraits, and nudes he painted.

In 1920, Miró moved to Paris, joining a community of artists and writers that included Pablo Picasso and members of the Surrealist movement, with which he soon aligned. Miró’s work from this period, including his solo show at Galerie Pierre in 1925, emphasized surreal forms and abstraction. In the 1930s, Miró’s style evolved as he experimented with lithography, collage, and found objects. He became internationally known in the late ‘30s, when his work was featured in The Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition and 1937 Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition. Though Miró was not typically political, the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War inspired him to embrace social criticism; his mural The Reaper (1937) and his painting Head of a Woman (1938) are considered expressions of solidarity with the Republican cause. During World War II, he produced ceramics that were often intentionally misshapen and fragmented. 

Miró’s postwar output included large-scale commissions, such as murals for the Terrace Hilton Hotel in Cincinnati, Ohio (1947), Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1950), and the UNESCO building in Paris (1958). The UNESCO murals, made of ceramics and called The Wall of the Sun and Wall of the Moon, earned Miró the Great International Prize of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Major retrospectives followed, including at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, in 1962. Miró’s legacy endures as a prolific and versatile artist who reshaped 20th century modernism with playful creatures and political themes. His work is held in many museums and institutions, including the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, Spain; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Tate Gallery, London, England; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York. 

GRAY has featured Miró’s work in major group exhibitions, including Modern and Contemporary Masters, 1992; Modern and Contemporary Sculpture, 2010; Fun House, 2013; and GRAY at 60, 2023.