Joan Miró

Instead of the constellations we are familiar with, stranger forms take shape in Joan Miró’s night sky. This series was imagined during a blackout at the outbreak of WWII in France, of which Miró said, “I had always enjoyed looking out of the windows at night and seeing the sky and the moon, but now we weren’t allowed to do this anymore, so I painted the windows blue and took my brushes and paint, and that was the beginning of the Constellations.”

Joan Miró once said, “Form is never something abstract. It is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird, or something else.” This philosophy is articulated in Bird-Catchers I, in which multi-colored lines that at first glance seem disconnected begin to take on recognizable shape. Though one cannot determine with certainty what the real-life counterparts of these forms are, they resemble faces and, at the suggestion of the title, perhaps wings.