Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca – Antònia Maria Perelló, Director

“I am originally from Palma but for almost thirty years I was at MACBA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, in charge of the collection. I had left Mallorca to study art and remained in Barcelona until suddenly in 2024  this opportunity to become the director of the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca triggered my return.”

MIRÓ AND MALLORCA

“Joan Miró (Barcelona 1893 – Palma 1983) spent his first years in Barcelona, but summers and holidays in the farmhouse Mont-Roig, Tarragona and Mallorca. His mother came from Sóller, Mallorca, as did his wife Pilar Juncosa, whom he married in 1929. In fact, their grandmothers being cousins, Joan and Pilar had known each other since his childhood trips to the island.”

“Joan Miró lived in Barcelona, then Paris, he travelled a lot to Japan, also the United States, where the youngest son of Matisse was his gallerist. But when he was around 60 years old they decided to go back to their roots in Mallorca, build a place here with big studios, ateliers to work. Joan and Pilar ended up spending the last 30 years of their lives here in Palma. They settled here in Son Abrines, Cala Major and their friend, the architect Josep Lluís Sert built the master studio Miró had dreamt of. Later Miró managed to additionally buy Son Boter, a neighbour’s 18th century rural house behind the studio with the Guggenheim International Award prize money for the ‘Mur du Soleil’ and ‘Mur de la lune’ at the Paris UNESCO building. This meant he could spread his work across both studios and simultaneously have more privacy from the prying eyes of neighbours. Originally intended for sculpture and storage, soon Miró made the old house his own and an artwork itself, sketching on the walls and turning sections into a printing and etching studio.”

“For Miró, the places where he lived where very important; Paris, New York and then Mallorca which represented a new start for him. Here he decided on a new path, reviewing his previous work, drawing a line and starting afresh. In the current exhibition ‘The Magic Spark’ we focus on this stage, you can see how he plays with his own work – or also destroys, it, burns it – creating new works from a new starting point.”

Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró
“Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca opened in 1992. Joan Miró had made a first donation to the city himself and after his death it was Pilar Juncosa who auctioned off her personal Miró collection to be able to finance the Moneo building and create the foundation as we see it here now.”

“With his donation starting the foundation, Joan Miró had intended to help young artists and we continue in this tradition: While we always have a main Miró exhibition, looking at his past and also the future of his work, for our parallel temporary exhibitions we invite mainly young artists. For these, we have three smaller exhibition spaces, Space Cúbic, Space Zero and the Auditori, in the main building by Rafael Moneo.”

TEMPORARY EXHIBITIONS

“This summer we exhibit Carlos Bunga, from Porto, Portugal, who creates big architectual installations as well as interventions, injecting movement through performance, creating doing and undoing. Jean Marie del Moral is a French photographer of Spanish parents living in Mallorca. Renowned for his photographs of artist studios, in this body of work he visits Mont-Roig del Camp where Miró used to spend his summers and first painted his detailed paintings – and Horta de Sant Joan, Picasso’s country retreat from where he launched Cubism in 1909. Del Moral connects the dots between these two parts of Catalonia where both artists lived and worked. Thirdly in our auditorium we present a program of films or videos. These will be devoted to Claudio Zulan, an Italian director living in Barcelona, who blends cinema style with documentary filmmaking. His choice of subject is sensitive to cities with their socio political issues – how citizens deal with change in their environment and create change themselves. His latest success is the documentary ‘Constelación Portabella’ (2024) about Pere Portabella, the legendary Catalonian film director celebrating his 100th birthday. At the foundation he will be presenting four of his films.“

VISITING THE MIRÓ FOUNDATION

“The Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca  is a very special place to visit with its three very different buildings: The two studios are Son Boter, an old farmhouse which currently is undergoing restoration works to protect Miró’s graffitis on the walls, and the ‘Sert Studio’ by Miró’s friend the modern architect Josep Lluis Sert, who was also a Dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design at the time. Completed in autumn 1956, this is where Miró worked every day of his 30 last years. Finally the foundation building by Rafael Monreal is home to the exhibitions and activity programs, the contemporary art library and Miró archives of personal documents, writings, photographs; here we also have ateliers for workshops in ceramics, sculpture, textiles and so on. Additionally, as we just received five sculptures from Palma’s Llotja exhibition ‘La força inicial’ we now have eleven big sculptures and a complete ‘Miró sculpture park.’”

MIRÓ TRIANGLE

“We are three different institutions in Spain dealing with Miro: one in Barcelona, another in Mont-Roig and finally this one in Mallorca. We are each independent foundations, but collectively we form an association called the ‘Miró triangle.’ That means that we can do  exhibitions or activities together and have also a very flexible policy of loans. This works very well and we often work together.”

Interview by Uscha Pohl    

miromallorca.com