[attach id=620008 size="medium" align="right"]Picasso’s Seated Nude Woman With Her Head Resting On Her Hand from the Fundación Mapfre’s Collections. Photo: Sucesión Pablo Picasso[/attach]

The exhibition Picasso and Miró: the Flesh and the Spirit, which Fundación Mapfre will be presenting at the Grandmaster’s Palace in Valletta, between April 7 and June 30, forms part of Picasso-Méditerranée, one of the most important cultural events to be organised on the artist to date.

This event, for which more than 50 institutions from across Europe have joined forces, aims to pay tribute to Picasso and his relationship with the Mediterranean world.

Organised on the initiative of the Musée Nationale Picasso in Paris, the programme explores the artist’s creations and the places that inspired him, offering a unique cultural experience and strengthening ties between all sides of the Mediterranean.

In this sense, both Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró were intimately connected to their native earth and their origins, and it should be remembered that the oeuvre of both artists establishes a dialogue with those two elements in an ongoing quest for the ‘perfect work’ that seemingly always lay just ahead.

Although 20 to 40 years separates some of Miró’s works from those of Picasso, they reveal shared characteristics of which the most important is perhaps an ongoing reflection on the process of artistic creation. This is, furthermore, a reflection present throughout almost all of Picasso’s oeuvre, as it is in Miró’s.

This process of reflection nonetheless reveals a series of differences, and it is precisely these differences that have given the two artists’ work the universal status that it enjoys today, ensuring that it continues to influence the art and culture of generations to come.

Whereas in the case of Picasso his questioning of the process of artistic creation takes its starting point from his own life, and the Suite Vollard includes elements that can be associated with his personal circumstances, including violence, love, death, lust and tenderness, Miró’s reflection was undertaken from a much more abstract perspective.

The programme explores the artist’s creations and the places that inspired him

In the paintings that make up the collection, there are no references to him but rather to the cosmos, the stars, nature and woman in all her aspects. As such, this is not a reflection on painting itself, or not just on painting, but rather an ongoing questioning of creation through art. And what is creation for an artist but life itself? Miró presented and ordered this life in an easily recognisable world, first applying the colour then locating his motifs within it, the ones that he had always used since he embarked on the creation of the Constellations (1942) and on which he constantly reflected. Birds, stars, animals, women, figures, areas of colour and lines are used to divide up his compositions and to depict spiritual worlds which speak of the harmony and beauty of the cosmos that we inhabit, although also on occasions of its ugliness and darkness, particularly in the final works in the collection.

Picasso and Miró: The Flesh and the Spirit is being organised by Fundación Mapfre in collaboration with The Office of the President of Malta and Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti.

Leyre Bozal Chamorro has been curator of Collections at Fundación Mapfre since 2009. She has a degree in art history from Madrid’s Universidad Complutense and has taught art history and semiology at the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED).