Description

A Catalan painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Joan Miró was a prominent figure in the history of abstraction. From Here and There: Figures by the Sea was made at the beginning of the artist's printmaking career and is characteristic of his compositions of the 1930s, which are populated by fantastic shapes suggesting living organisms. Although he was a prolific printmaker, Miró produced only five pochoirs (prints colored by hand with the help of stencils). This lively design of bold red and black forms tossing a ball on a sun-drenched, yellow beach illustrated Carles Sindreu's text, D'Aci i d'alla. André Breton, the leader of the Surrealists, described Miró as "the most surrealist of us all." An international intellectual movement that began in the 1920s, Surrealism's art and literature was characterized by dream imagery, unexpected juxtapositions, and automatic drawing, painting, and writing. Despite the fact that Miró never officially joined the group, his work is closely associated with Surrealism.