Curated by Anne Umland
In 1927, Joan Miró famously declared he would “assassinate painting.” His plan, as it turns out, was not to blow a hole in the medium’s heart, but to infiltrate its ranks and slip slow poison in its drink. After all, Miró never relinquished painting. Rather, as this exhibition will argue, he contaminated it—namely, with strategies of collage. In some works, flat forms are painted to look as if they were cut and pasted into the picture plane. In others, parsimonious applications of pigment float against an unprimed support. Miró’s “anti-painting” has been an enduring interest for curator Anne Umland, and this substantial exhibition, accompanied by a scholarly catalogue, will chart the pollutant’s course through more than ninety works as it metastasized, over ten years, from canvas to painted mixed-media assemblage.
