Chillida & Miró. Lignes Engagées: Paris

Undoubtedly two of the greatest European artists of the twentieth century, Miró and Chillida form a part of the gallery’s DNA. Beyond their personal relationship which was built on decades of friendship, mutual respect and public cooperation in support of shared causes, the exhibition aims to delve into the aesthetic principles and uniquely Spanish threads that tied Joan Miró and Eduardo Chillida to their work and sparked resonances between them and between their practices. In Mikel Chillida’s words: “When you put the names Chillida and Miró together, I think of two artists, two human beings, who are perfectly aligned, hugely committed to their art and engaged with the era in which they lived. I think of them as being incredibly free, in a context in which to be free carried great risk.”

A defining theme of our selection is the power of line in their respective oeuvres: the tension they create between space and mass, between the positive and negative, their  capacity to appropriate, to distill, to express, the very essence of their Basque and Catalan roots. Chillida once remarked that Miró’s lines were always convex and that his own were concave: “The curved lines that structure the work of Miró are everywhere but they have a special tension, a tension outwards.

 

Although by definition all lines are concave and convex, Miró has a special power to make all his curves tend to be convex and I myself am more concave. Why is this so? How is this even possible? Why curved lines over straight? Perhaps because the straight line – and this is a terrible truth – radically separates and divides two worlds?”

 

So we ask ourselves today. How is it that a line can divide us? Welcome us? Take us on a journey outside of the frame?