Miró and the United States @ Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona + The Phillips Collection, Washington DC - A Major Exhibition

Miró and the United States

Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

10 October 2025 – 22 February 2026

The Phillips Collection, Washington 

21 March – 5 July 2026

The Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, in collaboration with The Phillips Collection in Washington, presents a new and revealing exhibition entitled Miró and the United States, which highlights the intense, bidirectional and intergenerational relationship between Joan Miró and his contemporaries in North America. While it is well known that many North American artists were inspired by Miró, it is less well known that he was also inspired by North American art, particularly gestural, action and large format painting. This exchange and creative flow spanned continents and generations and is one of the central themes of the exhibition, which is part of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Fundació Joan Miró. Coming from a Spain devastated by the Franco dictatorship, the United States represented for Joan Miró not only art, but also a country of large open horizons, hope, democracy, future and endless possibilities.

Miró and the United States brings together an outstanding selection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, films and archival documents from American and European collections, as well as new studies by renowned specialists on Miró’s artistic evolution.

Miró and the United States is a unique exhibition because it offers a fresh look at Miró’s place in modern art, a reading that places the North American context at its heart. In other words, rather than focusing on the French context, which is essential for understanding his work from the 1920s and 1930s onwards, the show situates the United States as a pivotal territory in the evolution of Joan Miró’s artistic language, his international recognition and his connections with other artists. The United States enabled Joan Miró to undertake large-scale public projects – such as the sculpture Moon, Sun and One Star, made for Chicago – that would have been unfeasible in Spain at the time. The open and experimental environment of the United States helped Miró to consolidate his creative freedom and international recognition.

The exhibition therefore showcases key moments in Miró’s career in the USA: his two retrospectives in New York (in 1941 and 1959), his seven visits between 1947 and 1968, and also the pivotal role played by his dealer, Pierre Matisse, as well as the support of various American institutions and collectors.

The exhibition is a unique event as it displays 138 works from American and European collections as well as those from the Fundació Joan Miró’s own holdings, including both works by Joan Miró and approximately forty other artists. The selection is based on known connections and intergenerational relationships of admiration, including the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Helen Frankenthaler, Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, Alice Trumbull Mason, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, among many others. This artistic conversation demonstrates how Miró’s legacy continues to live on.

Based on years of research, the exhibition re-examines the established narratives about Miró’s position in the history of art through the selection of artists who feature in it. The different sections of Miró and the United States explore this relationship between Joan Miró and forty-nine contemporary artists from different generations. The exhibition also includes many artists who, despite not being originally from the country, moved or went there temporarily to develop part of their artistic careers. Driven by immigration, exile, the search for opportunities or cultural exchange, these creators played a decisive role in shaping the diverse and international North American art scene.

Although it has become commonplace, the fact that the centre of the art world shifted from Paris to New York is historically grounded. The global upheaval of the Second World War led to many European artists and intellectuals being exiled to the United States, fostering the emergence of North American Abstract Expressionism. This geopolitical and cultural shift was examined in a pioneering manner by Serge Guilbaut in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1985), in which he argues how New York appropriated the symbolic leadership of modern art.

Joan Miró witnessed and participated in the shift of artistic capital from Paris to New York in the period immediately following the turbulent years of the Second World War. This geopolitical and cultural reconfiguration, which may have once seemed distant, now resonates with an urgency and topicality that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. One of the major attractions of Miró and the United States is the curatorial proposal, which brings together works and artists that reveal connections between Miró and the North American art scene that have never been seen before. The exhibition also offers the public an exceptional opportunity to view works that have never previously been exhibited in Spain, including Lee Krasner’s The Seasons, which is on loan from the Whitney Museum for the first time.

Another exhibition highlight is the presence of Miró's Mural Painting, 20 March 1961 (1961), a monumental work that was exhibited several times in the 1960s: in 1961 at the Galerie Maeght in Paris and the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, and in 1964 in London and Zurich as part of the Miró retrospective organised by Roland Penrose. Since then, once Josep Lluís Sert had donated the mural to the Harvard Art Museums, this is the first time they have authorised its loan for an exhibition in Europe, a fact that makes its presence in the Miró and the United States exhibition a truly exceptional event.

Moreover, in an unprecedented move, the first two works that Joan Miró exhibited in the United States are reunited for the first time: Le Renversement (1924) and Painting (1926), which were originally presented at the Brooklyn Museum.

As part of Miró and the United States, the Fundació Joan Miró is presenting 22 pochoirs on paper of Constellations, dated 1959. Like the original Constellations of 1940-1941, they were conceived by Joan Miró so that they could be viewed from both sides. While these pieces have been previously exhibited in other settings, this is the first time they have been displayed according to this original, double-sided design, exactly as the artist had intended. This unprecedented curatorial commitment recovers his original vision, offering the public a fresh look at the formal freedom and experimental spirit that define his work.

Alongside important works admired by Joan Miró, such as Jackson Pollock's Number 14, are more surprising dialogues, such as that with Janet Sobel, whose Illusion of Solidity (1945) shows her to be the precursor of the dripping technique One of the exhibition’s crowning works is Lee Krasner’s The Seasons, a piece of imposing dimensions and sublime visual and emotional impact that is travelling to Spain for the first time. The exhibition also sheds light on female artists who had to use male pseudonyms to gain recognition, such as Henrietta Myers (Peter Miller) and Corinne Michelle West (Michael West).

The Miró and the United States exhibition arrives at a particularly opportune moment, filling a clear need in Miró’s artistic story. It transports us to another time and place – full of light, curiosity and risk – when art was a bold commitment to a better future. Amidst a 20th century marked by repression and instability, contact with the United States represented a source of creative energy and openness for Joan Miró, a democratic and dynamic horizon full of artistic opportunities. Miró actively engaged in dialogue with the North American artistic community, which became a place of inspiration and transformation. This fruitful exchange not only renewed his career, but also reinforced his ability to connect with a world in motion, full of contrasts and possibilities. The exhibition therefore invites us to look back and move forward with hope, to continue taking risks and to believe in the power of art as a tool for change and expanding horizons.

Miró and the United States

© Courtesy Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Miró and the United States, available in Catalan, Spanish and English. It includes texts by renowned Miró curators and specialists: Dawn Ades, Beatriz Cordero Martín, Marko Daniel, Matthew Gale, Patricia Juncosa, Robert Lubar Messeri, Teresa Montaner, Dolors Rodríguez Roig, Élisa Sclaunick, Elsa Smithgall and Anne Umland.

The Miró and the United States exhibition, co-organised with The Phillips Collection in Washington, will also be on show there from 21 March to 5 July 2026.

Curatorship: Marko Daniel, Matthew Gale and Dolors Rodríguez Roig from the Fundació Joan Miró, in collaboration with Elsa Smithgall from The Phillips Collection

FUNDACIO JOAN MIRO, BARCELONA

www.fmirobcn.org

Artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen @ Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona - "Tuan Andrew Nguyen Our Ghosts Live in the Future" - Exhibition by the winner of the 2023 Joan Miró Prize (8th edition)

Tuan Andrew Nguyen 

Our Ghosts Live in the Future

Exhibition by the winner of the 

2023 Joan Miró Prize (8th edition)

Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

10 May - 24 September 2024

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, 2023 Joan Miró Prize

Photo Pep Herrero © Fundació Joan Miró

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, 2019

Still - 4-channel video installation: colour, 7.1 surround sound; 

28 minutes; dimensions variable

Courtesy the artist

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

A Sullen Moon Behind Lit Mountain Tops, 2023

Image credits: Dan Bradica

Courtesy the artist 

The Fundació Joan Miró presents the first solo exhibition in Spain by Vietnamese-American artist TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN (Saigon, 1976), winner of the eighth edition of the Joan Miró Prize. The show includes some of his most poignant recent video installations, as well as a selection of his sculptures made out of fragments of bombs and artillery shells from the Vietnam War.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen and his family emigrated to the United States as refugees after the end of the war and he uses his artistic practice to interweave his own personal story through the history of his country of birth. This exhibition explores the ways in which conflicts from the second half of the 20th century have impacted not only the people who lived through them but also their descendants.

The show gets under way with three sculptures inspired by the mobiles of American artist Alexander Calder, a close friend of Joan Miró who was also an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. In stark contrast to Calder’s pieces, however, Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s mobiles are made out of fragments of bombs and artillery shells from the lengthy and devastating Vietnam War. In this context, Nguyen’s sculptures are more explosions than formal exercises in art. Moreover, they are also sound pieces, tuned to emit certain frequencies with healing properties. Imbued with deep symbolic meaning, they resonate with the Buddhist idea of the transformative power of compassion.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, 2022

Still, Single-channel video, 4k anamorphic, 

5.1 surround sound, 60min.

Courtesy the artist

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Because No One Living Will Listen / 

Người Sống Chẳng Ai Nghe, 2023

Still Two-channel 4K video, stereo

Courtesy the artist 

The next three works are video installations linked to the material and personal consequences of the Vietnam War. The first gives a voice to an old unexploded bomb that is about to be detonated fifty years after being dropped. Indeed, throughout Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s audiovisual projects, ostensibly inanimate objects often find a way to tell their own stories as key players in the unfolding endeavour of processing collective trauma. The second installation is a feature film about a mother and daughter struggling to make a living from the scrapyard business they inherited from the father. The daughter salvages metal from the remnants of bombs—the Vietnamese landscape is still studded with unexploded ordnance—to craft uncanny hanging sculptures. One day she accidentally stumbles into the realisation that she must surely be the reincarnation of Alexander Calder. A young Buddhist monk, inspired by the figure of Thich Nhat Hanh, teaches her about the healing properties of sound, which she then applies in her work to help her mother overcome her posttraumatic stress disorder.

The exhibition concludes with one of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s projects linked to the stories of families of non-French soldiers sent by the French colonial administration to fight in Vietnam in what became known as the First Indochina War (1946–1954). In Because No One Living Will Listen, a Vietnamese woman writes a heartfelt letter to her father, a Moroccan soldier in the French army who died when she was a baby. She tells him about the path her life has taken and confesses how disoriented she feels at not fully belonging anywhere—a feeling shared by many other descendants of mixed couples who have to find ways of juggling hybrid cultural identities and integrating their ancestors’ legacy into their own lives.

Our Ghosts Live in the Future gives Spanish audiences the first opportunity to experience Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s work in person and gain an appreciation of his artistic vision and committed interest in exploring social and historical issues thrown up by the destabilising effects of colonial legacies. In addition, repeated references in his pieces offer up rereadings of the work of American artist and antiwar activist Alexander Calder, a close friend of Joan Miró and Josep Lluís Sert whose presence is keenly felt in the Fundació Joan Miró Collection. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s practice resonates with the museum’s collection and with Joan Miró’s legacy as an artist with similarly strong ties to his native country.

The show not only offers a survey of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s work but also provides a unique insight into his artistic vision and staunch commitment to social and historical concerns that run through the core of his artistic narrative. It includes a previously unseen piece fashioned out of reused war ordnance made at the artist’s studio in Ho Chi Minh City. Like the sculptures presented at the beginning of the show, this piece is inspired by one of Alexander Calder’s mobiles, in this case The Corcovado, a large-scale sculpture that forms part of the Fundació Joan Miró Collection. At both the start and end of the exhibition, Tuan Andrew Nguyen engages with key figures in Western modern art who helped shape the dominant artistic narrative of the 20th century.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, 2023 Joan Miró Prize

Photo Pep Herrero © Fundació Joan Miró

TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN is an artist from Saigon, Vietnam who lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City. His works explore the power of memory and its potential to act as a form of political resistance. His practice is fuelled by research and a commitment to communities that have faced traumas caused by colonialism, war and displacement. Through his continuous attempts to engage with vanishing or vanquished historical memory, Tuan Andrew Nguyen explores the erasures that the colonial project has brought to bear on certain parts of the world. He works between various mediums but devotes much of his attention towards producing moving-image works and sculpture.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen received a BFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1999 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2004. He has been the recipient of several awards in both film and visual arts, including grants from Art Matters and VIA Art Fund. Radiant Remembrance, the artist’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition, was on view at the New Museum in New York from June 29 - September 17, 2023. His work has been featured in several international exhibitions, including the Aichi Triennial, Whitney Biennial in New York, Biennale de Dakar, Sharjah Biennial and the Berlin Biennale. His work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Curated by Martina Millà, head of exhibitions at the Fundació Joan Miró

FUNDACIÓ JOAN MIRÓ | BARCELONA

Parc de Montjuïc, 08038 Barcelona 

www.fmirobcn.org 

Ekin Kee Charles - Han Nefkens Foundation - Loop Barcelona Video Art Production Grant 2022

Ekin Kee Charles

Han Nefkens Foundation - Loop Barcelona Video Art Production Grant 2022

EKIN KEE CHARLES

EKIN KEE CHARLES (Malaysia, 1996) is the winner of the Han Nefkens Foundation - Loop Barcelona Video Art Production Grant 2022, in collaboration with the Fundació Joan Miró, MoCA TAIPEI; ILHAM, Kuala Lumpur, Center d’Art Contemporain, Genève; Art Hub Copenhagen and Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing.

Ekin Kee Charles - “Being born and brought up in the inland area of Sabah has been the biggest blessing in my life. No matter where I am in life I will always be the village girl that I am. Growing up, I have always wanted to leave my village but now I want nothing more than to go back. The personality, the environment, the community has made such an impact on me and I only realised that when I left. The land that has shaped me has so much character and stories and I wish to share the beauty that I see with others. This opportunity given by The Han Nefkens Foundation to showcase the beauty that I see is a big milestone. It means that more people from different dynamics will be able to appreciate the life that is rarely shined upon and I am very thankful and honoured. I want more people to appreciate where they come from, similar to how I appreciate my community and tradition through the works that I make.”

Established in 2018, the Han Nefkens Foundation - LOOP Barcelona Video Art Production Grant 2022 in collaboration with Fundació Joan Miró has established itself as a tool for increasing contemporary artistic production in the video art field. The Grant involves the production of a video art work. Ekin Kee Charles will receive $15,000 for the production of a new work to be completed by the end of November 2023 and to be presented at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona in 2024, during LOOP Festival. At a later stage, the new production will also be presented at MoCA TAIPEI; ILHAM, Kuala Lumpur, Center d’Art Contemporain, Genève; Art Hub Copenhagen and Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing. The Han Nefkens Foundation will receive a long-term loan of the produced artwork for presentation at art institutions worldwide with whom the Foundation collaborates with. In order to consolidate the candidates’ career, the Grant appraises emerging promising artists, who are 40 years old or less, of Asian nationality or living in Asia and who have established a solid trajectory, but have not had the opportunity to exhibit extensively. To achieve this, ten internationally recognized art critics and curators (nominated by all the partner institutions) carry out the scouting process. Through this exercise, the curators will expand the selected artist’s network of contacts as well as discover and get closer to lesser-known video art works and thus, promote this discipline.

Han Nefkens - "I was touched by the sensitivity of Ekin's work. It's clear that what she shows us is close to her heart. I am therefore delighted that, together with the six art institutions that participate in this grant, we will work with this young and promising artist from the periphery who is firmly on her way to develop her unique voice."

The Jury for the 2022 edition of the Grant was chaired by Han Nefkens and consisted of Emilio Alvarez, Founder LOOP Barcelona; Marko Daniel, Director Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Carol Yinghua Lu, Director Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing; Hua-Tzu Chan - Deputy Supervisor of Research Department, MoCA TAIPEI; Jacob Fabricius, Director, Art Hub Copenhagen; Rahel Joseph, Director, ILHAM, Kuala Lumpur and Andrea Bellini, Director, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Genève. The judging took place in the presence of: Hilde Teerlinck, General Director of the Han Nefkens Foundation and Alessandra Biscaro, Coordinator of the Han Nefkens Foundation. The Jury stated:

"We were delighted to select Ekin Kee Charles. Her profound video works explore in an unassuming way the societal pressures that women face every day. We all agreed that her work speaks clearly of a specific place and moment, while at the same time transcending - by virtue of its deep connection with the local - any particular culture, region or country. Her works combine this universality with a sensitive and poetic approach, offering a space for critical contemplation. We look forward to following her next steps."

EKIN KEE CHARLES is a young filmmaker from Kota Marudu, Sabah in Malaysia. She graduated from Universiti Malaysia Sarawak with a bachelor in Cinematography in 2019. Upon graduating, she ventured into the filmmaking industry to sharpen her filmmaking skills. Ekin has set the goal to tell stories coming from her community, to share what life is like in her suburban area and the love she feels for her community. Ekin Kee Charles is an alumnus of an exchange program for film students in Japan held by The Japan Foundation Asia Center under the program ....and Action! Asia 4 (2018) where she directed and co-wrote a short film ‘Your Shirt, My Socks’. The short film was a part of the SEAShorts |Next New Wave (Malaysia) under the program Love Letter from Japan. Your Shirt, My Socks also won the Best Short Film award at the 14th Mini Film Festival (Malaysia). In 2019, she took home the Grand Prize Winner Award of the 13th Edition BMW Shorties with her winning short film ‘PACE’, thus making her the youngest Grand Prize winner, at the age of 23 and the first East Malaysian director that has won the title to date. She also won the Best Editing Award and was nominated for Best Screenplay and Best Director. ‘PACE’ was also a part of several film festivals such as Minikino Bali Film Week and was in Cinebah 2021, a program that showcases a new wave of Sabahan filmmakers. Her latest short film credited as director & writer, ‘Rama-Rama’ funded by BMW Shorties has been a part of Clermont Ferrand Short Film Market Pick 2022 (France), 14th Cinema Rehiyon 2022 (Philippines) and Next New Wave | SEAShorts 2022 (Malaysia).

The initial selection of ten artists formally presented to the jury was made by the following scouts: Boliang Shen; Christina Li; Hyo Gyoung Jeon; Yee I-Lann; James Luigi Tana; Sau Bin Yap; Seolhui Lee; Sherith Arasakulasuriya; Shuang Li; Vanini Belarmino; Xue Tan.

The shortlist of seven artists, whose proposals were then shared and discussed by the final jury was:

- Boloho (collective), China

- Bo Wang, 1982, China

- Ekin Kee Charles, 1996, Malaysia

- Rui An Ho, 1990, Singapore

- Tao Hui, 1987, China

- Yoonsuk Jung, 1981, South Korea

- Zuqiang Peng, 1992, China

Fundació Joan Miró

Parc de Montjuic, 08038 Barcelona

www.fmirobcn.org

Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature @ Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature

Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

October 21, 2022 - February 12, 2023

Paul Klee

Glühende Landschaft [Glowing Lanscape], 1919

Oil on cardboard, 40,5 x 30,5 cm

Private collection, Switzerland

For the artist, dialogue with nature remains a conditio sine qua non.

The artist is a man, himself nature and a part of nature in natural space.

Paul Klee

Ways to Study Nature, 1923

Throughout his life, the Swiss-born German artist PAUL KLEE (1879-1940) felt an undying fascination for the observation of nature. For him, the contemplation of natural phenomena was an art in its own right, which allowed him to go beyond the world of the apparent in order to understand their intrinsic dynamics and to create works based on them.

Curated by Martina Millà, head of exhibitions at the Fundació Joan Miró, the exhibition Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature examines the link the artist had with the natural environment, in which he found not only a field of study and a pedagogical model, but also a source of inspiration and a vital refuge. In collaboration with the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern and with advice from its chief curator, Fabienne Eggelhöfer, the show also aims to demonstrate just how important the exploration of natural phenomena was for the formation and development of an artist like Paul Klee, one of the most outstanding artists of the European avant-garde and perhaps one of the most surprising ones to rediscover through the lens of nature itself.

The exhibition unfolds into four areas that propose a chronological journey through Paul Klee’s holistic view of nature, from his formative stage right up to his final artistic one. The Zentrum Paul Klee’s collection is the most important archive of the artist’s drawings and pictorial works. The Zentrum Paul Klee also conserves his library and the natural objects that interested him and accompanied his research. The bulk of the more than 200 pieces on display in the exhibition are from these holdings, while the rest are contributions from other outstanding international private collections and institutions. Within the context of the current revision of the canon and as part of the effort to recover the names and careers of artists silenced by the official account of the history of art, each section includes a work by a woman artist, of whom some were contemporaneous with Paul Klee, such as Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), Emma Kunz (1892-1963) and Maruja Mallo (1902-1995), while others were or are aligned with some of his artistic approaches, such as Sandra Knecht (Switzerland, 1968).

This project falls within the framework of a line of exhibitions organised in collaboration with other monographic museums of major artists of the avant-gardes. Based on the Fundació Joan Miró’s holdings, the links between the two institutions will also result in a Miró exhibition focusing mainly on the large format works that were made possible by the artist’s new studio in Palma de Mallorca from 1956, which the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern will host from January to May 2023.

In his formative years, Paul Klee’s curiosity for the origin of form and of artistic expression led him to meticulously study his most immediate environments: the outskirts of Bern and the family garden. The plants, animals, landscapes, geological formations and atmospheric and physical phenomena that he examined in his various places of residence and also while on excursions and trips strengthened his relationship with nature and had an impact on his unique poetics. The first area of the show presents the importance of the study of nature to the discovery of this artistic personality based on early drawings done between 1883 and 1911, among which is his first documented drawing, done when he was just four years old. In this selection, Klee dialogues with two major artistic legacies: naturalist drawing, which he was taught during his school years and which shaped his ability to pay attention to the visible; and classical culture and its internal order, which he discovered during his trip to Italy in 1901, filtered by the reading of J. W. von Goethe, and which encouraged him to disentangle the even more complex order inherent to the natural world.

Paul Klee’s interest in discovering the dynamics of nature, and the grammar of art that he began to elaborate from his observations, gradually developed in the years between the First World War and his arrival at the Bauhaus as a teacher. ‘Trip to Tunisia, and the First World War. Nature as an Enigma and an Escape (1912-1920)’ is the title of the second area of the show, which brings together oil paintings, watercolours and drawings, in which the contemplation of nature became a visionary instrument for coping with the tough moments that he had the misfortune to endure. Standing out in this room are works like Glühende Landschaft (Glowing Landscape, 1919), an example of Klee’s total landscape, where the artist aimed to represent not only the motif, but also the connectivity of organic, atmospheric and geological elements. Belonging to the same historical context as these is another oil painting included in this area: Abstrakt (Abstract, 1914) by the German artist Gabriele Münter, a member of the avant-garde group Der blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) of which Paul Klee also formed part during his time in Munich, until the outbreak of the First World War.

This baggage and his careful reading of books like The Metamorphosis of Plants by J. W. von Goethe together served as the basis for his courses at the Bauhaus, during the years of theoretical consolidation of the first avant-gardes. Entitled ‘Teaching at the Bauhaus. The Analysis of Natural Phenomena (1921-1931)’, the third area of the show presents around 70 pieces, among which are works, pedagogical materials and collections of natural objects such as preserved plant specimens and seashells, which provided him with a field of study. His works from this period and his theoretical compendium both manifest his reflections stemming from his contemplation of the internal laws of nature – movement, growth, recurrence, conformation, which he turned into the basis of his creative process and teaching programme. When Klee taught these notions at home, he would often invite students to spend time observing fish in his aquarium, just as he would do. To evoke the philosophy of these teachings, the design of this exhibition space reconstructs Klee’s aquarium by displaying works containing fish. The works brought together in this area have already transcended the apparent aspects of nature in order to compose themselves according to their internal principles, and that is what he encouraged his students to look for. Obeying these laws are titles like Vor dem Blitz (Before the Blitz, 1923), Klang der südlichen Flora (Harmony of Southern Flora, 1927) and Gemischtes Wetter (Unsettled Weather, 1929), where nature is represented by its constituent forces. These works dialogue with one of the characteristic geometric drawings by the Swiss artist and healer Emma Kunz, whose practices precisely flowed from using the energy underlying matter.

Finally, in his last stage, Paul Klee carried on working on these topics in a mature synthesis. They also became an artistic refuge when faced with the challenge of living the latter years of his life with a degenerative disease. So, the area ‘Synthesis and Identification. The Last Period (1932-1940)’ shows how, in the final stretch of Klee’s life, which was highly productive despite his fragile state of health, his understanding of the principles of nature and his communion with it reached the peak of their expression. All of this is clear to see in works like Der Winter kommt (Winter is Coming, 1939), where he uses his fingers to paint, arriving at his so sought-after transcendence of the dualism between subject and object: is body becoming one with nature through the pictorial medium.

The artist of today is more than an improved camera; he is more complex, richer and wider. He is a creature on the Earth and a creature within the whole, that is to say, a creature on a star among stars.

Paul Klee

Ways to Study Nature, 1923

Also presented in the last room is Protozoarios (Protozoans, 1981), a later work by the Spanish surrealist painter Maruja Mallo, who was interested in portraying the potentiality of natural shapes – flowers, shells, fruit or fantastical hybridisations of living organisms – and, like Paul Klee, continued painting them right to the very end. 

Sandra Knecht

My Land is Your Land Dark Night (Home Is a Foreign Place), 2022

Pigment print on cotton paper, 152 x 110 x 6 cm

Artist's collection

© Sandra Knecht

The exhibition concludes with an installation by the contemporary Swiss artist Sandra Knecht. She was born in the same canton as Klee and advocates rural life as part of her practice. To establish a dialogue with Paul Klee, Knecht makes a reflection on the disease that the artist suffered from, understood as a natural process. The resulting installation is entitled Dark Night (Home is a Foreign Place) and includes photographs, sculptures and an audiovisual piece referring to the natural world and rural tradition, as well as drawings by Klee, and photographs by Francesc Català-Roca of the natural objects that abounded in Joan Miró’s studio. Pro Helvetia has participated in Sandra Knecht’s project as a collaborating institution.

By examining the artist’s special experience of natural phenomena, the exhibition Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature also offers visitors an insight into how contemporary society has constructed its view of the natural world. 

In the words of its curator, Martina Millà: ‘at a time when, facing imminent planetary collapse, there is speculation about survival strategies […] we would like to see this project as an exercise that can help us reposition ourselves by revisiting that period which marked the start of the problematisation of our gaze and of our current understanding of the phenomena of nature. Visitors can find a great opportunity to rethink their relationship with artistic practices connected with the agenda of modernity and with a planet subjected to an unstoppable process of ecosystem and biodiversity destruction; a planet that has nevertheless been the sounding board and a canvas on which human creativity has been unleashed.’

Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature

Exhibition Catalogue

Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature is accompanied by a catalogue that reproduces a broad selection of the show’s works and includes a curatorial text by Martina Millà and an essay signed by Fabienne Eggelhöfer. The catalogue is completed by a conversation between Myriam Dössenger, a researcher at the Zentrum Paul Klee, and the artist Sandra Knecht, as well as a pedagogical manifesto written by Paul Klee in 1923 entitled Ways to Study Nature. This catalogue is available in english and in spanish.

An exhibition organised and produced by the Fundació Joan Miró in collaboration with the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.

Curated by Martina Millà, head of exhibitions at the Fundació Joan Miró, in collaboration with Fabienne Eggelhöfer, chief curator at the Zentrum Paul Klee.

This exhibition is sponsored by the Fundación BBVA.

Fundació Joan Miró

Parc de Montjuïc, 08038 Barcelona

fmirobcn.org