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Joan Miró 1893 - 1983 Personnage, oiseaux, 1977 Signed. Titled and dated verso Gouache, pencil and pastel on paper 19 7/8 x 26 in, 50.5 x 66 cm Provenance Private collection Exhibitions 2013: Lindau, Stadtmuseum Lindau, Miro – Sternennächte, 24 March - 1 September Personnage, oiseaux, from 1977, belongs to a series of work which Miró created in the last decade of his career, in which he used the theme of the woman and bird as a means of exploring the relationship between representation and abstraction. During trips to New York in 1947 and 1959, Miró met the young Abstract Expressionist painters, including Jackson Pollock. He admired the ambition of these artists and began to assimilate 'Action painting' techniques into his work. In the early 1960s, Miró almost completely abandoned representation in favour of gestural abstraction, such as the dripping and splattering of paint which is apparent here. However, by the 1970s he had begun to reintroduce his familiar visual vocabulary of signs and symbols that he had developed since the 1920s. Miró recognised that it was his interest in the expressive power of signs that set him apart from the Abstract Expressionists, "A form is never something abstract...it is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird, or something else". Personnage, oiseaux reveals Miró's continued fascination with the symbolic theme of the woman and bird. By 1977 Miró had moved back to Catalonia and taken once again his homeland as an important motif in his work. In this image he captures the Catalan sky and light; the symbols of the star and moon appear as small specks of paint on the paper. His female personages and birds, reduced to a series of delicate lines, have taken on a cosmic significance. In his artistic maturity Miró refined and achieved compositional simplicity; empty white space emerges between carefully placed lines, dots and marks, creating a dream-like space. André Breton believed that Miró had found a way to depict the "poetic reality" of life.

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