Femme dans la nuit (Woman in the Night)

Between 1928 and 1934 Joan Miró approaches the techniques of collage and building objects as a means of anti-pictorial rebellion against the traditional concepts of art. In his final period, from the sixties onwards, he aims to create a series of works that preserve his traditional and fascinating attraction to objects, yet the clear desire to build a corpus of sculptures leads him to the use of one of the most ancient techniques from this discipline: casting.The Museo Reina Sofía’s collection of Miró sculptures, consisting of 43 works dating from 1967 to 1981, responds to this criterion. They are works that arise from a great variety of always humble objects, and that after a long process of definition in which he prepared a multitude of drawings and sketches, was completed with the casting and the patinating of the bronze in the Parellada workshop in Barcelona. Femme dans la nuit (Woman in the Night, 1967) consists of three elements which are shaped from top to bottom: a perched bird, and the head and the body of a female figure. The rounded shape of the woman is organic and reminiscent of the pebbles, stones and mud from which it almost certainly originates. The hole carved into the lower part of this limbless body contrasts with the positive relief, made by imprinting, with which the hair made of smooth cuneiform lines has been drawn. The symbolic playfulness that places the figure in a landscape is completed with a reference to night-time by way of the star, a graphic element inserted into the back of the head, and the bird shape which Miró obtained by casting a unique piece of hardware.
Carmen Fernández Aparicio