Joan Miró

Joan Miró i Ferrà was born on April 20, 1893, in Barcelona, Catalonia, into a family of goldsmiths and watchmakers. He studied art in Barcelona before moving to Paris in 1920, where he was swept into the orbit of the emerging Surrealist movement and became one of its most distinctive voices. Rejecting the rational and the literal, Miró developed a singular visual language of biomorphic forms, primary colours, and whimsical symbols — stars, crescent moons, eyes, and creatures half-animal, half-dream — that felt both childlike and cosmically charged.\n\nMiró worked prolifically across painting, printmaking, sculpture, and ceramics, refusing to be confined to a single medium or style. His monumental ceramic murals — including the Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun at UNESCO headquarters in Paris — brought his imaginative universe into public spaces. He returned permanently to his homeland after long periods in France, eventually settling in Mallorca, where the Fundació Joan Miró was established in Palma in 1992. He died in Palma de Mallorca on December 25, 1983, and is remembered as one of the most joyfully inventive artists of the twentieth century.