This week’s Studio Sunday artist Joan Miro. Miro was a Spanish artist known mainly for painting and sculpture, and as one of the pioneering artists of surrealist abstraction in the early to mid-twentieth century. Born in Barcelona in 1893, Miro spent the majority of his career living and working in Spain and, occasionally, Paris.

The above photo shows Miro reclining in his studio in Mallorca, Spain, in 1977. This studio was designed and built specifically for Miro, a very established and respected living artist at that time.

Miro himself looks wonderfully small in this huge space surrounded by all of his paintings. This studio has a different feeling from many modern art studios, where the trend toward larger and larger works means that artists have just one or two massive projects filling up a room at a time. Miro’s studio is packed with easels – all of them small enough to fit easily into your average apartment or living room, harkening to an era of cozy studios and small-scale works.

It’s fascinating to see all of these artworks here like this at once – I wonder how many projects Miro had on the go at once. It looks as though there might be a drying rack higher up toward the ceiling in the left hand corner of the photo, so perhaps all these works are still in the process of being finished and tweaked to perfection.

The Fundació Joan Miró, a museum dedicated entirely to Miro’s work, was established in Barcelona in 1975. Another, the Fundacio Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in Mallorca six years later in 1981. Miro passed away in 1983, but his works remain in collections and museum throughout Spain and the world. 

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