Location: #3 Located in the lobby of the Center Tower on Town Center Drive
Joan Miró’s cast bronze “Oiseau”,” perched in the lobby of Center Tower, is a “Bird” of a monumental size and highly unorthodox order. Its bulbous volumes and spiky projections lend it a whimsical character, thoroughly in keeping with the great Spanish surrealist’s sense of humor. Miró is renowned for such fanciful abstractions, blending invention with the spirit of nature.
The artist is best known for his inventive paintings, but his sculpture is now gaining recognition as the triumph of his last years. Massive, three-dimensional pieces created near the end of his prodigious career seem to transform the strange personages of earlier paintings into physically imposing characters.
“Oiseau” is a marvelous example of Miró’s life-long ability to draw inspiration from intuition and dreams. His great bronze bird might have descended from a prehistoric age or it could personify an extinct species. The animal’s undeniable presence suggests the weight of history, while its improbable form could be the product of childlike fantasies. Robust, witty, awkward and endearing, this sculpture epitomizes Miró’s gift for sparking the imagination with life-affirming artwork.
“The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I’m overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains – everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me.”
- Joan Miró, 1958, quoted in Twentieth-Century Artists on Art
Joan Miró Bio: (1893 -1983) Barcelona, Spain. Joan Miró was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor and ceramist. His work has been interpreted variously as Surrealism, a fascination with the subconscious mind, an interest in recreating the child-like, and expressing Catalan and Spanish pride. In numerous writings and interviews dating from the 1930s forward, Joan Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods and his desire to abandon them (in his words, “murder” and “assassinate” them) in favor of more contemporary means of expression.
As a young man, Joan Miró was drawn towards the arts community that was gathering in Montparnasse, Paris, France and moved there in 1920. There, under the influence of Surrealist poets and writers, he developed his unique style: organic forms and flattened picture planes drawn with a sharp line. Generally thought of as a Surrealist because of his interest in automatism and the use of sexual symbols (for example, ovoids with wavy lines emanating from them), Mira’s style was influenced in varying degrees by art styles such as Surrealism and Dada, yet he rejected membership to any artistic movement in the interwar European years. Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealism, described him as “the most Surrealist of us all”
The Piece: Joan Miró‘s cast bronze Oiseau, perched in the lobby of Center Tower, is a “Bird” of a monumental and highly unorthodox order. Its bulbous volumes and spiky projections lend it a whimsical character, thoroughly in keeping with the great Spanish Surrealist’s sense of humor. He was renowned for such fanciful abstractions blending invention with the spirit of nature.
Trivia:
- Joan Miró confessed to creating one of his most famous works, Harlequin’s Carnival, while hallucinating due to a lack of food. He said he tried “to capture the hallucinations caused by my hunger.”
- Joan Miró won the 1954 Venice Biennale printmaking prize.
- In 1980 he received the Gold Medal of Fine Arts from King Juan Carlos of Spain.