Another coup for YSP with Miro show

An exhibition of the work of Joan Miro, a first major UK showing of his sculpture, opens in Yorkshire tomorrow. Arts correspondent Nick Ahad took a preview tour of the works.

THERE’S an old Yorkshire expression that describes the sort of morning that is misty but holds the potential to turn into a warm day.

Tykes of a certain type and age might well look to the sky on such a morning and declare: “It’s trying.”

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It’s a misty morning at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and it is trying out there – with little success. It remains misty with a little nip in the air.

It doesn’t matter too much this morning because inside the Park’s underground gallery there is a blaze of Mediterranean colour and sunshine.

The work of Joan Miró has been brought to the Sculpture Park and the artist’s vibrant, colourful sculptures are enough to bringing the park to sunny life even on the dullest spring morning.

Tomorrow sees the launch of this year’s major summer exhibition at YSP, entitled simply Miró: Sculptor.

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It is the first UK major exhibition of the sculptures of Joan Miró and looks set to prove another hit show for the park, which saw record visitor numbers with an exhibition of the work of another Catalan, Jaume Plensa, last year.

The Miró estate is handled by his two grandsons Emilio and Joan, who were on hand for the launch of the exhibition this week.

They do not easily lend out the work of their grandfather and the fact that they were intensely involved in the Yorkshire exhibition is telling.

“The sculptures are coming here from different places all around the world. Many of them are pairs – father and son, husband and wife, couples, so they are coming here to meet once again at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park,” says Emilio.

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Joan says that, even though this is the first time his grandfather’s sculpture has been exhibited so comprehensively in the UK, the YSP was the perfect place.

“The architect has not tried to be an artist, here,” he says of the designer behind the YSP’s Underground Gallery, where a large number of the Miró sculptures are on display.

“The architect has created a building where the brick, stone and glass and metal do the best thing which is show the art,” says Joan.

“Which is why we were very happy to work with the Park to bring our grandfather’s work here.”

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The Park, judging by the length and width of the smiles on show this week, are equally happy to play host to the Catalan artist. Clare Lilley has led the curating team in bringing the Miró exhibition to YSP for the past two years.

“The truth is, there were some concerns about following the work of one Catalan artist with another, bringing Miró here after Plensa last year, but you really don’t get very many opportunities to bring something like this to the UK, so when the opportunity came up, we just had to grab it,” she says.

Even though it follows an exhibition by another Catalan artist, the YSP simply would not have turned down the chance to show one of the last century’s greatest artists.

Last year the Tate Modern staged a retrospective of his work for the first time in 50 years, but, although there were a few sculptures dotted about, the London exhibition concentrated almost entirely on paintings.

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The YSP’s summer exhibition is the first time Miró’s sculptures have enjoyed such a thorough retrospective.

Lilley says: “Even though he was very famous as a painter, with a major retrospective of his work held in New York in 1941, he turned to sculpture in the 1960s and always said that he felt sculpture was very much ‘of the people’. He wanted his work to rub shoulders with the public and that is a philosophy that we absolutely share here at YSP.”

The work on display at the park spans a period from 1966 to 1982 and spreads across the Underground Gallery out to the lawns around the gallery and across the park.

What is striking is that, in contrast to the Plensa exhibition, it is incredibly full and ‘busy’ as a collection of work. The sculptures are given room to breathe outside on the lawn, but packed in tight inside the galleries.

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“The idea was to show how, in a relatively short space of time his work became so dramatically different. We’ve got work in a single room from Paris, Barcelona, Verona, Amsterdam,” says Lilley.

“It shows off his wide range but also the fact that he had this great skill of working with foundries and other craftspeople around the world who were helping to produce this work.”

Although the exhibition has been two years in the planning, the director of YSP, Peter Murray, has been working towards this for a long time now.

For the man who set up the park more than three decades ago, bringing Miró to the venue is the fulfilment of a long-term ambition.

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He says: “The timing has to be right. Miró’s work is in collections all over the world, so we have had to work very with private collections and museums and other venues all over the world. It all come together and the demands on the work are such that it had to be this year, otherwise the work will be off in other collections. This was the moment when we could bring all the work together, so it had to be now.”

Having the first major retrospective of the sculptural work of Miró is simply yet another feather in the cap for Yorkshire, which in the last year has staked its claim more solidly than ever to be the UK’s – if not the world’s – capital of sculpture.

The YSP has an international reputation, as does the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and with the opening of The Hepworth Wakefield – celebrating the work of the locally born sculptor – to be the first with the Miró exhibition solidifies further the reputation and position of the county in the international art scene.

Last year’s Plensa exhibition was undoubtedly more accessible than some of the other exhibitions the park has staged in recent years, and going for the popular vote proved a winner, with 350,000 visitors going to the park last year.

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The Miró exhibition, one suspects will, pull in a similar audience.

Murray says: “The key thing in making this happen has been working closely with the grandsons who look after the estate.

“They trusted us to show their grandfather’s work well – once they came to the park and saw the facilities we had here, they were very happy to work with us.

“It is a real coup for YSP to get the first retrospective of this work of Miró’s in the world.”

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