Femme sur la place d'un cimetière (Woman in a Cemetery)

Between 1928 and 1934 Joan Miró approaches the techniques of collage and building objects as a means of anti-pictorial rebellion against the traditional concepts of art. In his final period, from the sixties onwards, he aims to create a series of works that preserve his traditional and fascinating attraction to objects, yet the clear desire to build a corpus of sculptures leads him to the use of one of the most ancient techniques from this discipline: casting. The Museo Reina Sofía’s collection of Miró sculptures, consisting of 43 works dating from 1967 to 1981, responds to this criterion. They are works that arise from a great variety of always humble objects, and that after a long process of definition in which he prepared a multitude of drawings and sketches, was completed with the casting and the patinating of the bronze in the Parellada workshop in Barcelona. Femme sur la place d’un cimetière (Woman at the Square in a Cemetery, 1981) is a very original work within Miró’s output due to its architectural format and a model which could evoke some of the works loaded with the dream-like melancholy of Giacometti’s early work, although with a very different shape. Miró starts with several commonly used objects such as a box lid, matchboxes and a cane rod, arranging them on several boards that serve as the base of the sculpture. In this space thus configured, the modelled figure of the bird woman seems minute, and the focus of the composition, a large empty space, could evoke the escaped space in the painting, alluding to a shape filled with enigma centred on the idea of death, to which the title of this work refers.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio