Phantasmagorical monsters in nature: Joan Miró

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Saskia Warren gives us a glimpse of Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) will create ‘a wonderful world’ for the forthcoming survey of sculpture by Catalan artist Joan Miró (1893–1983), Dr Helen Pheby tells me on a behind-the-scenes tour of the show. After an aborted foray into business, the artist began his career as a painter with the human figure, landscape, creatures and celestial symbols recurrent in his oil works, and his later collages and acrylics.

Associated most usually with Surrealism, Miró worked in a variety of styles that also show his engagement with both Cubism and Abstraction. From 1944, in collaboration with the ceramicist Llorens Artigas, Miró experimented with ceramics, producing objects and murals. In the mid-1960s in his ‘second career’ as a sculptor, Miró went on to create large-scale bronzes and assemblages, innovating further with materials such as wool, cork, cloth, clay and stone. Miró notably described his characterful sculptures as ‘phantasmargorical monsters’. He considered painting to be an urban pursuit and related sculpture to the countryside. In Palma de Mallorca in 1974, Miró, then aged 81, told American sculptor Alexander Calder, ‘I am an established painter but a young sculptor’. Drawing parallels with Henry Moore, the first patron of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Miró wrote that ‘sculpture must stand in the open air, in the middle of nature’. This insight is shared by the Successió Miró in Palma de Mallorca, which considers the park’s exhibition to be the most important so far, owing to its potential to stage his artworks between gallery and landscape.

On 17 March 2012 the first major survey of Joan Miró’s sculpture in the UK will launch to the public at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Over 100 works will appear in the exhibition, lent by nine different collections and owners across Europe, including the Reina Sofia, Madrid; Collection Isabelle Maeght, Paris; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek. Encompassing the Upper Space of the Visitor Centre, the four rooms of the Underground Gallery, and the Underground Gardens and terrace, ‘Miró: Sculptor’ features sculpture with related lithographs, sketches, models and artefacts.

The importance of the exhibition is affirmed by the collaboration with the artist’s estate and foundations in Barcelona and Palma. Witnessing the show as it took shape after extensive planning, the artist’s grandson, Emilio Fernández Miró, and Pilar Ortega, curator of Successió Miró, were both observed on site contributing to the curating and reviewing the final details of the exhibition catalogue. In late January the exhibition of fellow Spanish sculptor, Jaume Plensa, finished after drawing record numbers of visitors to the park. With eight weeks between the two ambitious exhibitions, during my visit in February the team were occupied re-landscaping the gardens, drilling, siting and setting the bases of the bronzes, and condition-checking Miró’s collection of colourful lithographs.

Guided by the curator through the RIBA award-winning Underground Galleries, along with representatives from the YSP learning team, I learnt about the design of the exhibition. The fragility of assembled sculptures from the 1930s prevents them from travelling from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Accordingly, the YSP survey tells the story of the artist’s diverse and rich career as a sculptor, with selected highlights from his oeuvre. Room 1 contains the large-scale bronzes Oiseau Solaire (Solar Bird,1966), Oiseau Lunaire (Moon Bird, 1966)and Maternité (Maternity,1973).

Room 2 comprises smaller and medium bronzes with a focus on human heads, the female form and birds. Meanwhile  larger-scale bronzes are featured in Room 3 alongside playful chair works, including Monsieur et Madame (Sir and Madam, 1969). Framed lithographs add colour and points of comparison between Miro's 2-D and 3-D works on the walls of both Room 2 and 3. A bright yellow wall marks the Project Space, where quotes from Miró, sketchbooks, photographs and objects used by the artist inform understanding of his sculptural processes. Among an assortment of found objects that Miró used to create his sculptural assemblages are a doll’s arm and basket. Fittingly, elsewhere in the Underground Galleries stands the resultant sculpture, Personnage et oiseau (Personage and Bird, 1968), with the totemic black, red and blue Personnage (1984) standing proudly at the end of the concourse.

In dialogue with the works in the gallery, 16 works will appear in the open air. Bronze figures are sited in the Underground Gardens. A further three bronzes are sited on the terrace overlooking the vista across the 18th-century-designed landscape.The Upper Space in the Visitor Centre also displays limited edition prints that are on sale to the public.

Miró’s works are strongly connected with the bright colours and poetic symbolism of the Catalan landscape. The show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park offers a unique opportunity to experience Miró’s art in a new environmental and critical context with a focus on the intersections of sculpture with landscape. The exhibition will extend over nine months through spring, autumn and winter. During this period the painted bronze Jeune fille s’evadent (Girl Escaping, 1967) in Room 3 will be replaced with La Caresse d’un Oiseau (The Caress of a Bird, 1967). A series of events are also planned that will draw from Catalan culture, restaged with a Yorkshire influence.