Sin título (Untitled)

From the late 1920s, Joan Miró embarked upon an anti-pictorial quest as he experimented with new methods of expression such as collage and constructions using unusual materials, forms that were strongly at odds with the painting-painting euphoria and the bourgeois art market. Sin título (Untitled) is one such collage made with anti-pictorial materials, whereby Miró would incorporate, as a mirror, a sheet of aluminium foil. Expressionism characterised Miró’s output in the 1930s, reflected in deformed and grotesque figures which inhabit undefined and unsettling spaces. As in other works from this period, there is a strong sexual component, and in this particular piece Miró presents two monumental phallic forms, although only one is on the verge of penetrating a schematic vagina.

Raúl Martínez Arranz