brafa brafa

Helene Bailly Gallery

Alternate Text

19/12/2014

A unique creation by four hands 

Personnage V, at once a deformed fantasy and a familiar reality, is the result of collaboration between Joan Miró and Llorens Artigas. A small fantastical being, it challenges our assumptions while exuding joy and lightheartedness. The various events that were tearing Europe apart, and in particular the Spanish Civil War, permeated Miró’s style in that period. He became more realistic and more violent and his palette more acidic. The spontaneity of his colour and the specificity of the physical form enable each viewer to seek his or her own interpretation and symbolism.


From 1944 on, at Miró’s insistence, the two artists began working together. Not without some apprehension on the part of Artigas, since the work of the ceramicist was known above all for its natural gravity and quest for formal purity, while the painter, for his part, brought to his studio his permanent anxiety and persistent interrogation of the unconscious.
  
This ceramic painting or sculpture deploys all the genius and poetry of a joint invention in which it is impossible to distinguish where the work of the painter begins and that of the ceramicist ends.

Personnage V, 1946
Joan Miró (1893-1983) & Josep Llorens Artigas (1892-1980)
Enamelled ceramic, 26 x 23 x20 cm – unique example

Exhibited by the Helene Bailly Gallery (Paris) - stand no. 85

Helene Bailly Gallery_Joan Miro Joseph Lorrens Artigas