Joan Miró was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1893. From 1912 to 1915, he studied at the progressive art school run by Francesc Galí in Barcelona. Miró made his first trip to Paris in 1920, where he encountered leading figures of the avant-garde, including Pablo Picasso, Tristan Tzara, and André Masson, and became closely associated with the circle of artists and poets that would shape Surrealism. By the mid-1920s, he had emerged as a significant figure within the Surrealist movement. His celebrated “dream paintings” of this period, characterized by freely flowing lines, vivid colors, and an enigmatic vocabulary of symbolic signs, marked the emergence of his highly distinctive visual language.

Working across a remarkably diverse range of media, including painting, drawing, printmaking, collage, sculpture, ceramics, monumental murals, and tapestry, Miró is celebrated as one of the most innovative and influential artists of the 20th century. In 1941, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York presented his first major museum retrospective. In 1954, he received the Grand Prize for Graphic Work at the Venice Biennale. In 1958, Miró collaborated with Spanish ceramicist Josep Llorens Artigas on the monumental ceramic murals Wall of the Sun and Wall of the Moon for UNESCO headquarters in Paris, for which he received the Guggenheim International Award. In 1975, the Fundació Joan Miró opened in Barcelona, becoming an important institution dedicated to Miró’s oeuvre and the promotion of modern and contemporary art. Miró died in Palma de Mallorca on December 25, 1983.