MIRÒ. THE COLOUR OF DREAMS, 11th SPTEMBER – 12th DECEMBER 2021

The Fondazione Magnani-Rocca announces an original exhibition on Miró. Curated by Stefano Roffi, Foundation's scientific Director, with contributions of Spanish and Italian scholars. "Miró. The Colour of Dreams", the title of the exhibition, will be displayed in the sumptuous "Villa dei Capolavori" in Mamiano di Traversetolo, close to Parma, from September  11th  to December12th, 2021.

"An innocent with a smile on his lips, strolling in the garden of his dreams": this is how the poet Jacques Prévert described Joan Miró, the famous Spanish artist who lived in one of the most fervent period in the history of art. His art was based not much on the traditional image, but on sensations, immediate emotions and suggestions: bright colours and strong contrasts, fine lines and hallucinated, dreamlike subjects.

Miró (Barcelona 1893 - Palma de Mallorca 1983) painted," notes Director Roffi, "inspired by the forms of nature, as well by music; for a period he also composed poems in a surrealistic style, following psychological mechanisms similar to those adopted in painting. He clearly aspired to the divine and music and poetry were his sources of inspiration. Sometimes the words also appear in the paintings, constituting their key to interpretation. A relationship between painting-music-poetry that fits in well with the interests and sensitivity of Luigi Magnani, founder of Magnani-Rocca".

"Visiting the exhibition means," concludes Director Roffi, "travelling inside Miró's dreams because this is the plot of his art".

The exhibition, realised in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, based in Madrid, through fifty works between the 1930s and the 1970s, mostly oil on canvas, proposes an itinerary that, orchestrated like a musical score, highlights the artist's continuous challenge to traditional painting, "with works such as Cheveaux mis en fuite par un oiseau where Mirò literally massacres painting as we know it, with a certain parallelism with American Expressionism in the idea that painting should be a continuous flow of paint resulting from a profound creative explosion, while guaranteeing its forms a disruptive individual integrity despite the metamorphoses it has undergone".

Particularly documented in the exhibition are the last decades of Miró's activity, with canvases of great format and poetic beauty such as Personnage et oiseaux devant le soleil and Personnage devant la lune, and the recurring themes that he frequently reinvented - with the constant use of symbols such as the stars, birds or woman, and fanciful representations of heads - while at the same time emphasising influences as diverse as folk tradition, Asian calligraphy or urban graffiti. Miró's painting tends towards abstraction; however, in the colourful, fantastic forms juxtaposed together, there is almost always a trace of the real: an eye, a hand, the moon. Some of the paintings in the exhibition are reminiscent of starry skies, such as Personnage, oiseau, ètoiles of 1944 or Après les constellations of 1976.

Miró’s extraordinary activity as an illustrator is represented in the exhibition at the highest level, thanks to the artist's book with poetic texts by Tristan Tzara Parler seul (1950), with seventy-two colour plates by the Catalan artist, displayed in large showcases.

Transgressive and non-conformist, the artist combines his more contemplative soul with a unified poetics of dream and colour, to escape banality and conventionalism, giving life to a universal artistic language, at the same time unique and original. As Mirò said: "A simple brushstroke can give freedom and happiness".

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