Video: UK first for sculpture park’s Miro show

Visitors to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, at West Bretton, Wakefield, will get the chance to experience the repertoire of this iconic Catalan artist

Peter Murray CBE, executive director of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), said: “Joan Miró at YSP will be the largest sculpture exhibition of this important Spanish artist to date.

“It is a great achievement to bring such an international event to the region and will attract a lot of national and international support.”

Miró produced around 400 sculptures and a similar number of ceramic works, the majority concentrated within the later part of his career.

The artist viewed sculpture as equally important to his practice as painting although it was generally less known and critically examined.

From his initial exploration of collage and assembled sculpture around 1930, sculpture became increasingly central, most notably from the 1960s to his death in 1983.

The park’s purpose-built Underground Gallery will host Miró’s “phantasmagoric world of living monsters”.

They trace the evolution of sculpture as an element of Miró’s practice from 1946 through to 1982.

The works will relate to the sculptures for the open air shown in the gardens beyond the gallery’s glass concourse.

Gary Verity, chief executive of Welcome to Yorkshire tourism agency, said: “Miro’s work earned him global fame and we hope this will encourage visitors from around the world to pay a visit to the YSP and see these works first hand.”

With key works sited in the Yorkshire landscape, the exhibition will fulfil the artist’s belief that “sculpture must stand in the open air, in the middle of nature.”

It opens on Saturday and runs until January 6 2013.