Miró’s workshop

with Ellen Turner Hall

A wide-ranging exhibition of Miró’s interests in painting, ceramics and sculpture is currently at the Rigaud Museum in Perpignan.

Opening the exhibition, a photograph of the artist’s Majorcan workshop established in 1956 shows where Miró often worked from morning until late at night.  His personal space and the objects he kept near him are  a fascinating insight into the man who valued simplicity, nature, order and silence.

Miró’s first paintings were red, yellow, green and blue outlined in thick black lines. Black increasingly imposed itself  on the canvas as he developed his style until the end of his life where  black finally dominated.

Choosing to work in isolation, Miró avoided copying any other artist, trend or  school. Instead  he explored  how to present the world differently.   Convinced that art was not what you see but what you feel  lead him to abandon figurative painting for the abstract. Perhaps Miró’s  paintings of amorphous objects  floating in space are best understood seen through the mirror of a small Calder mobile  from the museum’s collection.

Meeting the Catalan ceramicist Artigas inspired Miró to try his hand at a new medium. Four clay tablets,  rough-cut as if unearthed from some ancient civilization, are decorated by  the artist with primitive figures of circle heads atop triangle bodies and stick arms.  Underlying much of Miró’s work is a belief  in the beauty of imperfection.

A sculpture of a small man with a bird perched on his head,  introduces another  means  of expression. Constructed from  recycled objects, the  head is a basket, its  ears the handles,  the nose a crushed can.   Other sculptures are assembled with hammers, paint cans, hooks and chisels, castaway objects, whatever was at hand.

Miró’s works  are mostly  untitled, leaving up to you to make sense of, for instance, a blank page of squared  notebook paper  glued to a black canvas decorated with scattered lines, dots and stars.

A man of constant reinvention, Miró  produced  within the confines of his workshop  his  vision  of the wide world.

Miró, Majorque, L’atelier des rêves  runs from 27 June to 31 December 2026 at the Musée d’art Hyacinth Rigaud, Perpignan. For details: www.musee-rigaud.fr