Lot 296 D

This sheet belongs to a series of very fragile and delicate compositions that Miró created in 1966: in order to find a solution, pursue an idea, collect his thoughts. The spots and dabs and the short line bringing order to them follow a natural rhythm. They grow, form themselves into structures and networks, stretch across the surface. A conceptual rigour emerges in spite of their informal openness - Miró has drawn an intense formative process: pictorial ideas are developed with an eye to detail, but in spite of all their independence, they are assessed in terms of their significance for the greater whole. Surprising strokes of inspiration alternate with careful calculation. In 1924 Miró wrote to the young writer and ethnologist Michel Leiris: “In drawings, objects sail on a flat plane.” Years later, in the 1960s, the artist revealed the enormous amount of effort it costs him to reach the sought-after emptiness envisioned by him. In viewing his work, it is of course possible to distance ourselves from this complex questioning and interpreting, to imagine natural phenomena such as a starry night sky and to fall in love with this characteristic and highly poetic motif for this reason. Miró once referred to himself as “travaillant comme un jardinier” - a wonderful metaphor for his unbroken will to artistically also provide the world with emptiness. “By the way”, Miró said in 1959 (cited in exhib. cat. Joan Miró: Arbeiten auf Papier, Kestner-Gesellschaft Hanover 1989/1990, p. 13), “in my pictures there are very small forms on large, empty surfaces. The empty spaces, horizons and surfaces, everything that is empty, has always greatly interested me.”