Miró – I work like a gardener
Arken Museum of Modern Art, Skovvej 100, 2635 Ishøj; Tues-Sun 10:00-17:00, Wed 10:00-21:00; Adm: adults 85kr, groups (min. 10) 75kr, pensioners 70kr, students 70kr, under 18s free; 4354 0222; www.arken.dk

‘I work like a gardener’. This was the way in which Spanish-Catalan artist Joan Miró once described his work, while comparing his studio in Palma de Mallorca to a kitchen garden. The interesting thing about Miró is that he saw everything in the world as living and organic and he applied this perception to his art. Last weekend, Arken Museum of Modern Art launched an exhibition that deals with this exact side of Miró’s oeuvre.

Arken focuses upon modern art from 1945 and onwards. Danish contemporary art seems to be the museum’s focal point, but once in a while we can also expect to see some of the more classic artists like Miró represented at the museum. ‘It’s the ways in which existence is considered that we are interested in here at Arken,’ says museum director Christian Gether when explaining why Miró fits exactly into the museum’s line of exhibitions.

Miró is perhaps best known as a painter and as a frontrunner of the abstract surrealism of the 1920s and 30s. This exhibition, however, focuses on the late Miró, showing 109 works from 1956-1980 lent by the great French Fondation Maeght. The year of 1956 symbolises a turn in Miró’s life, as it was the year his new studio in Mallorca was completed. This meant that he finally had a home where he could gather all of his works and possessions, after years in exile due to General Franco’s political persecutions.

These were also the years when Miró began to create his bronze sculptures, which is why a great deal of the exhibition consists of sculptures. He aimed to create pieces that could last forever. Miro was a manic collector and he used objects that he picked up on his walks around the local area in his sculptures. They were lost, used, discarded or just natural objects, but Miró came to see them as living beings. ‘By using objects and giving them human shape shows he perceives the universe as a whole and living organism,’ explains the exhibition curator Andrea Rygg Karberg. Many of the objects appear again in his art and they are all characteristic of Catalonia, the Spanish state that he loved so much. But because the objects were of perishable material, he decided to recreate them in bronze.

He did, however, move away from the traditional way of sculpting where bronzes often were publicly displayed, representing important and wealthy figures of society. Rather, he used these Catalan objects. ‘In this way he creates the optimal democratic bronze sculpture,’ says explains Karberg. And to complete these experimental pieces, he often painted them in the five, obligatory colours of blue, yellow, red, green and black.

Known for his quirky line and his use of explosive primary colours, his art seems rather joyous and childlike. At first glance, it’s especially his sculptures that seem to carry some rather innocent and humoristic features, but there are more layers to these pieces. Take for example Personage (1967),  which at first seems like a rather harmless, cartoon-ish sculpture that resembles a colourful creature  with three black legs, a red torso, a round yellow face with a rather childish and funny facial expression, and a red arm that reaches into the sky. But when the viewer realises that the torso is actually made out of an old chopping block, the piece takes upon a whole new meaning. Is it the creature’s body or is it in fact a chopping block on which a decapitated head lies? ‘He explores the human soul and the whole world in his pieces,’ says Karberg who notes how themes such as violence, aggression and erotica are often found in Miró’s work when one digs a bit deeper.

The exhibition space itself has a great home-like atmosphere to it. Many of the smaller sculptures have been placed in groups on greenhouse-like platforms, like exotic plants, drawing a direct line to Miró’s comparison of his studio to a kitchen garden. Here and there we meet his human-like creatures, in the shape of the bigger sculptures, that in some way make the place seem alive. And in the background we hear the recordings of Duke Ellington playing beautifully for Miró at the Fondation Maeght in 1966. Additionally, there’s not much text interfering with the art experience. There is, of course, the obligatory introduction of the exhibition upon entry, but from then on it’s up to the audience to seek information and interpretations of the art on the two computer screens put up in the art space. All of these things combined gives the audience an entertaining and vivid art experience that is worth the train ride it takes to reach the museum.