After meeting Picasso, Miró will receive Matisse in the fall of 2024 in what is undoubtedly shaping up to be one of the great exhibitions of the year. Organized with the Musée Matisse in Nice, Miró Matisse: Beyond Images will examine for the first time the deep relationships of admiration between two artists who belonged to generations (Matisse was 24 years older than Miró), artistic environments (Fauvism and Surrealism ) and very different artistic approaches. The exhibition, from October 24 to February 9, will be curated by art historian Rémi Labrusse, and will start from a biographical basis: How did they have access to each other’s works? From there it will focus on decisive moments in which these exchanged glances were particularly decisive.
Matisse shared with the poet Louis Aragon some reflections on the living artists who interested him most: “Miró… yes, Miró… because, regardless of what he represents on a canvas…, if at a certain point there is placed a red spot, you can be sure it was there, and nowhere else, where it was supposed to be… Take it out, and the painting falls.” And later it would be based on his works to overcome the pictorial crisis that he suffered in the second half of the 1930s. They had many friends in common (Aragon, Breton, Christian Zervos, Pierre Matisse or Aimé Maeght). And the painter’s son, Henri Matisse, was in charge of making Miró’s work known in the United States starting in 1934.
A new and exciting face-to-face that will replace the one that can currently still be visited, Miró Picasso, which will continue to be on display until February 25 (also the Picasso Museum) and whose good reception from the public has largely allowed the visitor numbers to recover. before the pandemic, which will close the year with around 360,000. In 2024, the Fundació Miró will also grow in budget (eleven million euros) and in May it will host the first exhibition in Spain of the Vietnamese artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen (Saigon, 1976), winner of the eighth edition of the Joan Miró Prize. The exhibition will include some of the most relevant video installations of his production, as well as sculptures made from bombs and artillery shells used during the Vietnam War.
Before, once the Miró-Picasso exhibition is over, the Miró Foundation collection will return to its usual space. As explained by the head of the collection, Teresa Montaner, the works that will make up the collection in this next stage will be presented from a series of areas that will highlight fundamental aspects of Miró’s creative process, such as the earth, understood as nature and also as a cultural tradition, poetry, matter, the sign, which serves as a basis for writing its own language that will be universal, or mural painting and anonymous art.
Finally, the Espai 13, which this year celebrates its 45th anniversary, will present the new cycle We will accompany each other when it gets dark, curated by Irina Mutt, an initiative that was born with the intention of exploring interdependence, explaining it and sharing it through four individual exhibitions in that each artist will contribute their perspective on their way of inhabiting the world, managing spaces and reaching agreements on how we inhabit them. Those selected are Alba Mayol, Inari Sandell, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Helena Vinent.