It is in sculpture that I will create a truly phantasmagoric world of living monsters. — Joan Miró

In the wake of Joan Miró’s retrospectives at Sejong Center for the Performing Arts (2016) and My Art Museum (2022) in Korea, Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul presents an exhibition of the Catalan artist’s late bronze works, which have rarely been seen in Korea. Finding its roots in surrealist assemblage, his sculptural work evolved into an essential facet of his practice, crystallising his unrelenting spirit of experimentation. The sculptures shed light on Miró’s avant-garde use of found objects which he masterfully metamorphosed into uniquely poetic sculpted constellations. Conceived in his Majorcan studio, the works incorporate elements Miró scavenged on the Balearic island, from folk art and craftwork to coastal flora and minerals. The exhibition is accompanied by an important early gouache, as well as two photographs by Irving Penn that portray Joan Miró alongside his sculptures, translating the symbiotic relationship between the artist and his works.

Joan Miró began experimenting with the medium of sculpture as early as 1922, inspired by the formal wealth of the plants and stones he collected in the Catalan countryside around his family farm in Mont-roig. During the early 1930s, the artist made further incursions into the tri-dimensional realm through the creation of surrealist Constructions and subsequent Objets poétiques incorporating found objects such as a taxidermied parrot. In 1944, he embarked upon an artistic partnership with the master ceramist Josep Llorens Artigas, which they renewed in 1953: a crucial collaboration from which Miró emerged as a true sculptor. From the 1960s onwards, sculpture became paramount for the artist, who notably built a site-specific labyrinth of statuary at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence between 1961 and 1981. The works on display, which were created in the final years of his life, distil the ever-inventive nature of Miró’s sculptural practice.

Irving Penn’s photographs of 1948, also on view in the exhibition, capture Joan Miró in all his sculptural splendour. In one shot, Miró non-chalantly leans on the roof of his Catalan home in Tarragona, his cosmic sculptures brushing the sky, while in the other, the artist cradles his biomorphic sculpted creatures as he pierces Penn’s lens with his gaze. These masterful photographs reveal the ingenuity of Miró’s sculptural production of the 1940s: small bronze figures distinguished by primordial volumes that he modelled directly with his hands, like a ceramist. Demonstrating the striking development of the artist’s sculptural work, the exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul focuses on Miró’s later ‘assemblage sculptures’ created from found everyday objects, wherein, as art critic and poet Jacques Dupin has set forth, ‘the real, almost unique inventiveness of Miró the sculptor lay.’

Created in his Sert atelier in Majorca, the sculptures on view reflect Miró’s avowed hypnotisation by the inexhaustible natural elements and bric-a-brac he harvested on the island, ranging from twigs and pebbles to siurells, folkloric ceramic whistles. As the artist confided in his grandson, Joan Punyet Miró: ‘When I go for a walk I don’t hunt for objects as if I were looking for mushrooms. There’s a sudden force, bang! like a magnetic force that makes me look down at a certain moment.’ Miró would scatter the foraged objects on the floor of his studio, before instinctively arranging them into configurations that sparked a ‘poetic shock’ that he ultimately immortalised in bronze. Drawing on the surrealist logic of oneiric automatism, Miró’s alchemical sculptures transmute the simplest, most humble bits and pieces into supreme works of art. As his close friend Joan Prats quipped, ‘When I take a stone, it is just a stone. When Miró grabs a stone, it is a Miró.’

The exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul kindles ‘the tremendous feeling of entering a new world’ that Miró sought to conjure up with his corpus of sculptures. In one work, Miró morphs a clothes hanger, bamboo sticks and fragments of plastic into a spirited gymnast on the brink of performing, while in another, a totemic embracing couple emerges from a palm tree stump piled with synthetic foam rubber and a deformed bottle. Harnessing the ‘spiritual’ energy he divined in each object, Miró transformed the seemingly disparate array of elements into unique sculptures imbued with his childlike whimsy, Catalan humour and inimitable poetry. In the gallery’s outdoor courtyard stands Miró’s three-metre-tall Femme et oiseau (1982): first conceived in 1962 as a ceramic, this iconic bronze is a precursor to his monumental Dona i Ocell sculpture of 22 metres, which was inaugurated in the Parc de Joan Miró park in Barcelona the following year. The imposing, abstracted female figure – whose primitive forms and incised hypertrophied sex hark back to Paleolithic mother-goddess statues – is crowned by a moon-shaped bird that symbolises the potent connection between the earthly and celestial realms that runs through Miró’s artistic practice.

Not only does the exhibition provide a unique opportunity to experience Miró’s sculpted dreamscape in Korea, but the space at Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul was specially designed to embed his works in the Korean aesthetics and literati philosophy of the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1897). Though he never had the opportunity to visit Korea, Miró’s sensitivity to his surroundings resonates with the profound appreciation of nature that pervades traditional Korean art. In his own words, ‘May my sculptures be confused with the elements of nature, trees, rocks, roots, mountains, plants, flowers.’ To reflect this, the viewer encounters each sculpture through the opening of a rice paper construction rooted in chagyeong – a key concept of traditional Hanok architecture signifying ‘borrowed scenery’, whereby an aperture subtly draws the natural world into one’s space. The structure’s intricate design simultaneously nods to the artist’s seminal Labyrinthe Miró erected at the Fondation Maeght, as well as the surrealist fascination with mazes as a metaphor for the mind. The expressive bronze sculptures come in and out of view like jagged landscapes framed by windows or open doors. Weaving the Catalan artist’s animistic sensibility with a Korean aesthetic consciousness, the exhibition heightens the spiritual essence of Miró’s radical assemblage sculptures.

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