Signs and Configurations
Raclin Murphy Museum of Art
provided the annotation:
Surrealists often experimented with innovative materials and techniques, intentionally using humble materials in an attempt to escape conventionality. This work, from Miró's series Signs and Configurations, combines oil, sand, and tar, what Miró termed "tar paper graffiti." He restricted his palette to a few elementary colors and used abstracted forms and abbreviated signs to represent the human condition. Although his earlier works celebrated nature as a source of joy, the political situation in Europe in the mid-1930s turned his thoughts to the more menacing aspects of the Surrealist vocabulary. Traumatized by the atrocities of the world wards and Spanish Civil War, Miró expressed the collective tragedy of Europe through this type of irrational, and at times, chaotic work. Symbolically, he absented color from his work in 1936--a rarity in his vast repertoire.
See portfolio.Date
1936
Creator
Location
Raclin Murphy Museum of Art
The Spanish painter, ceramist, and sculptor Joan Miró was among the most prominent Surrealists, but he stood apart from any movement and developed a personal visual imagery. His works changed reality into a universe of signs and symbols that, despite his fascination for the bizarre and monstrous, still point to concrete parallels in the real world. Miró's desire for innovation led him to many new combinations of materials and techniques. About 1933 he started experimenting with paintings on sandpaper. He restricted his palette to a few elementary colors and used abstracted forms and abbreviated signs for parts of the human body, developing only the head, the foot, and the eye...Miró's early paintings celebrated nature as a source of joy, but as the political situation in Europe worsened, his zest for life gradually changed to thoughts of suffering and death. from Snite Museum of Art, Selected Works: Snite Museum of Art (Notre Dame, 2005)
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