Although the new art season is greeted with ambitious exhibitions in many galleries and museums, Arkas Art Center in Izmir has the privilege of hosting the works of Joan Miró, one of the most iconic figures of 20th century art.
Arkas Art Center, which opened its doors in November 2011 in Alsancak, Izmir, continues to shape the cultural and artistic identity of Izmir with the important exhibitions it organizes. Having broken a record in the city's history with its Picasso: The Art of Spectacle exhibition that it opened in 2020 and reached 100 thousand visitors, Arkas Art has now brought 74 works of the Catalan painter and sculptor Joan Miró, who produced them with a wide variety of techniques throughout his life, to the city with the exhibition Joan Miró: Image, Text, Sign. 74 works selected from Miro's collection, which belongs to the Portuguese State Contemporary Art Collection and is under the auspices of Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea Porto, Portugal, will be exhibited for five months.
The exhibition, which consists of Miro’s works produced on a wide variety of surfaces such as packaging, paper, masonite, panel, tapestry, sacking and newspaper, and in techniques such as bronze, drift wood and ceramics, stands out as one of the most comprehensive Miró exhibitions ever held in Turkey.
The exhibition, led by Arkas Art Center Director Müjde Unustası, is curated by art historian and academic Robert Lubar Messeri, one of the most important Miró experts in the world. An important piece of information shared about curator Messeri at the opening of the exhibition is that his maternal family emigrated from İzmir in the 1920s… Messeri describes his encounter with the city on the occasion of the exhibition by saying, “This city means a lot to me. When I was growing up, İzmir represented a very big history, a very big home that we left.”
The exhibition, organized in collaboration with Arkas Art Center and the Serralves Foundation, undoubtedly has a meticulous and long-term work behind it. Speaking at the press conference of the exhibition, Arkas Holding Board Chairman Lucien Arkas also emphasized the importance of this intensive work and collaboration carried out with museums and institutions around the world in the background, saying, “This is our 27th exhibition in 13 years at Arkas Art Center since 2011. We always have a secure and respectful relationship with prestigious museums and collectors abroad, and we exchange works of art within the scope of our exhibitions.” Lucien Arkas says the following about the Miró: Image, Text, Sign exhibition:
“We are bringing Joan Miró works to İzmir for the first time. In fact, we can say that this exhibition is one of the most comprehensive Miró exhibitions organized in our country. The exhibition also includes works by the artist that have never been exhibited in Turkey before, such as the Sobreteixims and Burnt Canvases series. In my opinion, Miro is the person who started surrealism. That is why he is important. Pioneers have a different value. When you first see his works, you are surprised and try to understand what he wants to say. That is what he wants. I am sure it will be a successful exhibition.”
At the opening, which was also attended by Izmir Metropolitan Municipality Mayor Cemil Tugay and Porto Mayor Rui Moreira, Lucien Arkas also gave the good news that the Georges Pompidou collection, a contemporary museum and cultural center from Paris, will be transferred to the new art center they will open in Izmir two years later.
In his speech, Serralves Museum Director Philippe Vergne emphasized that the Miró Collection has an international story that started in Italy and said, “This exhibition in Izmir has great meaning and importance for the Serralves Foundation Contemporary Art Museum, as the works of the Catalan painter and sculptor born in Barcelona are being exhibited for the first time in Turkey.” Expressing his excitement for the Miró Collection to meet a completely new audience in the next five months, Vergne said, “Your cooperation and support were very important for the Miró Collection to meet new art lovers in Turkey. In this way, the Serralves Foundation has fulfilled a part of its mission to introduce and make accessible this extraordinary collection.”
Arkas Art Director Müjde Unustası, who emphasized that the preparation process started approximately two years ago, detailed the exhibition as follows:
“The collection is very important and unusual in two respects. First of all, it covers Miró’s 60-year career without focusing on a specific period. The oldest work in the collection dates back to 1924 and is a very important work. As a matter of fact, Miró started using the language of signs as of this year. The newest works date back to 1981. These are works made by the artist two years before his death. Another feature of the collection is that it reveals the richness of the techniques and materials Miró used. Miró is an artist who works with very different techniques and materials. He likes to surprise the audience by transferring artistic techniques to different mediums. This collection is also very valuable in terms of seeing this diversity he uses and discovering how he transfers different techniques from one medium to another.”
Curator of the exhibition Robert Lubar Messeri said, “Miró defined himself as a painter-poet. For him, poetry did not have to consist of words. He always had a deep interest in poetry: He wrote, read, and lived in close contact with poets. The marks he left on the paintings became a kind of handwriting. This interaction affected Miró’s entire artistic practice after 1924. Therefore, in this exhibition, we wanted to look at Miró’s artistic practice within the triangle of image, text, and sign,” and explained Miró and the content of the exhibition as follows:
“This exhibition is a selection of 74 of the 85 works in the Miró Collection. We refer to Miró as a surrealist, but when you look at the explanations on the wall, I don’t think you will see the word surrealism mentioned even once. Just as Picasso was much more than a cubist, Miró is much more than a surrealist… Therefore, as we tour the exhibition, we will see various works from Miró’s multidimensional career spanning 80 years. (…) We will see his paintings and you will see that Miró’s works constantly jump from one medium to another, constantly try different methods and different techniques. Miró is an artist who translates a work he produces in the medium of painting into another work, and he is also an artist who has worked as a translator in his time… Therefore, he does not see his works as a drawing, a sculpture, a painting. He sees them as a concept beyond that. Again, in the exhibition, the symbols written and drawn on paper in accordance with the Asian tradition express that they mean much more than a text… We see that he has developed a brand new visual language…”
There is an interesting story behind the collection of Miró, who influenced many generations of artists in Europe, Japan and America, and how it was brought to the city of Porto and the Serralves Foundation; due to the economic crisis he went through, the Portuguese bank put the Miró Collection, which it owned, up for sale at a world-famous auction house and the works were dispersed outside the country, which caused great reactions from the Portuguese public. Later, the collection was brought to the foundation through the efforts of the public and the government.
The Spanish Dancer and Burnt Canvases
The Spanish Dancer from 1924 is one of the groundbreaking images produced by Miró in the exhibition. Curator Robert Lubar Messeri draws attention to the extremely frugal style of the work, while he points out that in this work, the dancer's body reconstructs the dancer's anatomy from the root to the root with various images. Miró constructs a new narrative by creating visual rhymes throughout the work. In this way, he radically shakes the expectations regarding the objects in the space.
The weavings in the Soreteixims series are not traditional tapestries. Here, Miró tries to break aesthetic molds, as he does in the works he produces in other media. Here, he also shows how he transforms craft into high art. Miró produced thirty-three Sobreteixim and Sobreteixim Sac for this series between 1972 and 1973, together with a young weaver named Josep Royo. Again, Royo and Sobreteixim and Sobreteixim Sac began working on Burnt Canvases in the abandoned flour mill in Tarragona, where they produced their series together. This work by Miró, which simultaneously destroys the show and gives it new life through a striking act of alchemical transformation, also represents a turning point in his career.
In addition to the paintings that made the artist famous, the Sobreteixims series, which aims to bridge the gap between paintings and fabrics, and an example of the Burnt Canvases, which emphasize that art can be used as a powerful tool of criticism beyond being an aesthetic expression, are also being exhibited for the first time in Turkey.
Joan Miró
Born in Barcelona on April 20, 1893, Miró grew up in a period of great social transformation in his homeland of Catalonia. Later, like the artists of his time, he settled in Paris to continue his creative activities. He created his own unique style by being influenced by many artistic movements, from Impressionism to Fauvism, Primitivism to Cubism.
His signature painting-poems, biomorphic forms, geometric shapes, abstracted and semi-abstract objects; helped shape an original understanding of art that was continued through many media, from canvases to ceramics, sculptures to tapestries. Without conscious thought, Miró painted automatically and expressed his subconscious, expressing the emotions repressed in the depths of his consciousness with colorful brush strokes. With this style, he became known as one of the important figures of the Automatism movement.
His radical and innovative style played a critical role in the 20th century avant-garde's increasing turn to abstraction. Miró, although associated with early Surrealism and influential on the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters, created a unique visual vocabulary that cannot be categorized in modern art.
Joan Miró: Image, Text, Sign, an exhibition that examines Miró’s irreducible artistic personality and a 60-year production journey, can be seen at Arkas Art Center until February 9.
Source: https://artdogistanbul.com/joan-miro-arkasta/