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Lot Essay
Miró’s sculptures were the crowning achievement of his late career. Although he had created surrealist painting-objects during the late 1920s and 1930s, it was not until a decade later, while he was living in Palma, Montroig and Barcelona during the Second World War, that he considered making large free-standing forms. Throughout his oeuvre, Miró fixated on the idea of woman as the ultimate generative symbol, connecting her with the fecundity of the earth, with creativity, and the artist's own flights of imagination. Indeed, he saw much of his sculpture as bound up in nature, while the bronzes he cast from figures modelled in clay were indebted to the folk ceramics of Mallorca and Catalonia.
From raw and found materials, Miró has conjured a new poetry and meaning that evoke unconscious primordial forms and ancient long-forgotten myths. Like much of the artist's work, Figure departs from representation and reality in an attempt to stimulate the imagination. It encapsulates Miró’s spontaneous and playful approach to sculpture, incorporating objets trouvés, or found objects.
In 1972, David Sylvester observed that Miró was a self-made sculptor, not a born one, having developed his talent for three-dimensional form whilst in his fifties. It was perhaps for this reason, Sylvester explained, that Miró had a "tendency to put more trust in the given shapes of found objects than in his power to invent forms in the round" (D. Sylvester, Miró Bronzes, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1972, p. 15). Two years later, the artist stated in an interview with a French newspaper, "To paint, to sculpt, to etch, is maybe to give form to a myth, to produce a new reality from a given material, from a physical thrust that forces a gesture to be carried and placed in the world. The real suddenly appears from this struggle. Nothing is foreign to painting, to etching, to sculpture: one can work with anything—everything can be useful. If I frequently integrate the objects as they are, with raw materials, it is not to obtain a plastic effect but by necessity. It is in order to produce the shock of one reality against another…I need to walk on my earth, to live among my own, because everything that is popular is necessary for my work" (quoted in R.-J. Moulin, L’Humanité, 25 May 1974).
From raw and found materials, Miró has conjured a new poetry and meaning that evoke unconscious primordial forms and ancient long-forgotten myths. Like much of the artist's work, Figure departs from representation and reality in an attempt to stimulate the imagination. It encapsulates Miró’s spontaneous and playful approach to sculpture, incorporating objets trouvés, or found objects.
In 1972, David Sylvester observed that Miró was a self-made sculptor, not a born one, having developed his talent for three-dimensional form whilst in his fifties. It was perhaps for this reason, Sylvester explained, that Miró had a "tendency to put more trust in the given shapes of found objects than in his power to invent forms in the round" (D. Sylvester, Miró Bronzes, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1972, p. 15). Two years later, the artist stated in an interview with a French newspaper, "To paint, to sculpt, to etch, is maybe to give form to a myth, to produce a new reality from a given material, from a physical thrust that forces a gesture to be carried and placed in the world. The real suddenly appears from this struggle. Nothing is foreign to painting, to etching, to sculpture: one can work with anything—everything can be useful. If I frequently integrate the objects as they are, with raw materials, it is not to obtain a plastic effect but by necessity. It is in order to produce the shock of one reality against another…I need to walk on my earth, to live among my own, because everything that is popular is necessary for my work" (quoted in R.-J. Moulin, L’Humanité, 25 May 1974).