Although he was born in Barcelona and grew up as an artist in Paris, Majorca and Joan Miró were forever linked from the moment the masterful artist fell in love with an islander, Pilar Juncosa, and with the island in general, where he eventually lived from 1956 until his death on 25 December 1983.
Joan Miró's works are not just images, but sensations, immediate emotions, and suggestions. In Miró's works there is all the energy of the Mediterranean Sea, seen through the eyes of an "innocent man with a smile on his lips, walking in the garden of his dreams", as Jacques Prevert wrote about him.
A great experimenter and eclectic artist, Miró used all kinds of materials as the basis for his works: canvases, cardboard, Masonite, pieces of iron: everything had dignity to become a work of art. His creativity is not only expressed through the technique of painting, but also through collages, sculptures, monuments, lithographs, ceramics, stage designs, tapestries, and so on.
Considered to be the most fervent exponent of Surrealism, he expressed his contempt for conventional painting. Reality for Miró was a point of departure, never of arrival. Miró's work retains a dreamlike, hallucinatory aspect thanks to the use of strong, bold colours such as yellow, black, red or blue. It is made up of essential forms, as if the artist stripped the subject of everything superfluous.
In 1956 Miró moved permanently to Palma, where he had the studio of his dreams. This workshop, built in a traditional Majorcan house, was donated by Joan Miró and his wife to the city of Palma in 1981. One of his great projects was to make a study center for artists with a space for the exhibition and conservation of his own collections. Today, in the Pilar and Joan Miró Foundation, we can find a collection that includes more than 6,000 works by the artist, which make it undoubtedly one of the most important contemporary art spaces in the world. In addition, in summer it usually hosts concerts and events in its gardens. Moreover in Palma, there are other museums that also have works by the artist, such as the Juan March Foundation and the Es Baluard museum.
The Gardens of the Marivent Palace surround the summer residence of the Spanish Royal Family in Mallorca with a green blanket of more than 9,000 square meters made up of more than 40 different native species. In the middle of the green mantle, you can find 12 bronze sculptures created between 1969 and 1981 by Joan Miró that were donated by the artist's family for installation in the gardens.