Joan Miró ladders

Curated by Marko Daniel, Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape retrospective shows the most staggering work conceived by the Catalan artist. His inventive identity is set against planes of color laid-out in thirteen rooms across Tate Modern fourth floor. With each series entitled to its own room, the first of them explore Miró's commitment to his native Catalonia. An auto-portrait developed by displacing archetypal figures in to simple arrangement of signs – as is the case with The Head of a Catalan Peasant (1925) –, and the juxtaposition of unrelated objects, in Animated Landscapes (1926-7), for instance. Whereas the middle section reflect Miró’s new pictorial language. The first rooms in this section may suggest a withdrawal from the harsh realities of the world, the atmosphere of uncertainty arousing from his exile in France in late 1936 and «the terrifying years of the Spanish Civil War». The furious abstract painting on masonite (1936) are one example and The Constellations (1940-1) series's another imagery. While the later rooms epitomize Miro’s conflicting tendencies towards political engagement and his inner escape into creativity. The body of work conceived during this phase reflect the artist greater confidence in the balance he established between recognition on the international stage and inner exile at Mont-roig, in Catalonia. Finally, «the final section looks at the last years of Franco’s rule», when his painting «capture the tireless energy of creativity», challenging the dying regime that was animating the intellectual circles in Spain, in the late sixties. But, particularly revealing, is the American Abstract Expressionism influence in Miró's work that are shown in the central rooms. Four vast triptychs (1961-2, 1968 and 1973) mark the artist immersion into a new chromatic creation of space.