Joan Miró, face to face with contemporary art / photo gallery

The Catalan artist Joan Miró (1893 – 1983) insisted in the 1970s that he was not a modernist old master, but wanted to be seen and accepted as a contemporary practitioner whose work is in tune with what’s new in the art world.

The Art Deco Villa on the grounds of the Serralves Foundation in Porto hosts the exhibition ‘Elective Affinities: Joan Miró and Contemporary Art from the Serralves Museum Collection’.

The title of the exhibition comes from the field of chemistry, where it stands for the natural compatibility of certain compounds. The German philosopher Goethe later adapted this concept to emphasize human emotional bonds and affective relationships between people, things or ideas that are instinctive and chosen rather than imposed. In its current application, the phrase “elective affinities” denotes unexpected visual and conceptual dialogues that cross time and space, meeting points where intuition replaces formal influence.

The exhibition takes as its starting point 24 paintings, drawings, sculptures and textile objects created by Miró in the 1960s and 1970s, with occasional forays into his earlier practices. Alongside these are 53 works by Rui Aguiar, Helena Almeida Almeida, Armando Alves, Giovanni Anselmo, Michael Biberstein, Wang Bing, Marcel Broodthaers, Pedro Calapez, Luisa Cunha, António Júlio Duarte, Josep Guinovart, Ana Hatherly, Jörg Immendorf, Asger Jorn, Anselm Kiefer, Jannis Kounellis, Barry Le Va, Julie Mehretu, Robert Morris, Blinky Palermo, A.R. Penck, Graça Pereira Coutinho, Júlio Pomar, Dieter Roth, Agostinho Santos, Julião Sarmento, Thomas Schütte, António Sena, Nikias Skapinakis, Susana Solano, Ângelo de Sousa, Pedro Sousa Vieira, Antoni Tàpies.

From painting and sculpture to collage, installation, photography, video and multimedia works, from Process Art to Arte Povera, at every point of intersection, Miró’s work dialogues with contemporary artistic practices.

The exhibition, on view through January 2027, is divided into nine sections, each proposing a thematic perspective through which to view the works: Processual Art; Landscape, Memory and Matter; Pictura en abîme; Anti-monuments; Language; Re-imagined Expressionism; Drawing as Practice; Collage and Modern Life; and Place/No Place.