Model for the Tête sculpture

27 May 2025 - 19 October 2025

“It is in sculpture that I am going to create a truly phantasmagorical world of living monsters.” J. Miró, Work notes, 1941

Here is an unknown, uncommon and exceptionally preserved Miró. It is a work in plaster, belonging to an intermediate phase in the creative process, merely provisional and intended to be destroyed or forgotten. On the basis of this model, the author undertook an enlargement, serving to cast the final work in bronze in 1978.

Miró —who had learnt to paint with his eyes closed, by feeling forms— confessed the physical pleasure he felt on shaping this obedient, ductile, highly malleable substance with his hands, allowing him to witness the genesis of his imaginary world. These qualities shine out of this work: the smooth, matt whiteness of the plaster, its fragility and lightness, its ability to capture light, the plasticity of its tiny details, its roughness and at the same time its elegant grace.

Joan Miró’s vocation for sculpture came on his late, around 1944, in the middle of a world war. From that time on he was passionately devoted to this art, as poetic as his painting, though more challenging. This plaster of Paris reveals to us the heart of Miró's inspiration: his “Franciscan” love for ordinary things, such as for example a sweet wrapper. The artist, letting himself be carried away by his associative imagination, metamorphosed the original scrap of paper until, by twisting the paper and adding a few lines with a marker pen, it took on a human form. But a disquieting human form, a “living monster”, a totem, a mixture of joke and horror, tinged with strangeness by the whiteness of the plaster.

María Bolaños, art historian