Miró otro, 1969

 

Exhibition in Catalan Institute of Architects, Barcelona.

Studio Per (Oscar Tusquets Blanca, Lluis Clotet, Cristian Cirici and Pep Bonet)

Exhibition to celebrate the 75th birthday of the painter Joan Miró. A series of exhibitions and celebrations were held in Barcelona, dealing with the apparently more child-like side of the artist. Studio Per proposed to the Colegio de Arquitectos de Cataluña (the Catalan Institute of Architects) that another, more intimate side to the artist should be portrayed, showing his more daring facets which dealt with sex and violence.

    Miró agreed to this parallel exhibition and cooperated by lending several original works, as well as becoming personally involved in painting the windows of the Colegio de Arquitectos in the heart of Barcelona's Gothic quarter, where the exhibition was held. Miró proposed to the members of Studio Per that they should paint freely, using colours manufactured by the firm Valentine that he had personally selected; then, using a broom and only the colour black, he gradually transformed the whole mural. This experiment in painting was filmed by the film-maker and politician Pere Portabella.

    When the exhibition closed, it was proposed that the originals painted by Miró should be kept, since the artist was willing to donate them to the Colegio de Arquitectos, but the assembly of the Colegio declined on the grounds of the spontaneous, ephemeral spirit of the event, opposing the magnification of art. The next day, the cleaning ladies moved in and scraped the mural off, thus restoring the glass on the front of the building to its former transparency; and so an enormous Miró painting was dissolved in a bucket of water, in an alternative performance worthy of the most conceptual form of art.