Jeune fille (Young Woman)

Between 1928 and 1934 Joan Miró approaches the techniques of collage and of 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. Jeune fille (Young Woman, 1967) is a work with a flat frontal view and horizontal structure with important pictorial connotations. Created from the cast of several planks of wood, a nail and a rake that is missing one of its teeth, it evokes, because of the frame concept it is built from, the missing space of the painting. In this sense, the artist favours the frontal view, contradicting the three-dimensional nature of sculpture, and it is this surface where the graphic signs representing the face of the figure are found, while the upper part, in the shape of a rake like those used in agriculture, refers to the hair and to a perched bird as a symbol of evasion.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio