Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937

This will be the first major museum exhibition to focus on Miró the “antipainter,” identifying the core practices and strategies he used to attack “painting” between 1927 and 1937, a crucial decade within his long career. Taking Miró’s notorious declaration of 1927—“I want to assassinate painting”—as its starting point, the exhibition begins with the remarkable series of works on unprimed canvas singled out by Louis Aragon as collage avant la lettre and concludes with Miró’s return to realism in Still Life with Old Shoe. Acidic color, grotesque disfigurement, purposeful stylistic heterogeneity, and the use of resistant, ready-made materials are among the key “tactics of aggression” that will be explored. By assembling in unparalleled depth the interrelated and oppositional series of paintings, collages, objects, and drawings of this decade, this tightly focused exhibition reveals underappreciated aspects of an artist long regarded as Surrealism’s greatest, and most lyrical, painter-poet. Organized by Anne Umland, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. The exhibition is supported by the Institut Ramon Llull of the Government of Catalonia.

Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937
Kuratorin: Anne Umland