Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937

This first major museum exhibition to focus on Miro the "antipainter" identifies the core practices and strategies he used to attack "painting" between 1927 and 1937, a crucial decade within his long career.

Taking Miro's notorious declaration of 1927 - "I want to assassinate painting" - as its starting point, the exhibition begins with the remarkable series of works on unprimed canvas singled out by Louis Aragon as collage avant la lettre, and concludes with Miro's return to realism in Still Life with Old Shoe.

Acidic color, grotesque disfigurement, purposeful stylistic heterogeneity, and the use of resistant, readymade materials are among the key "tactics of aggression" explored in the exhibition.

By assembling in unparalleled depth the interrelated and oppositional series of paintings, collages, objects, and drawings of this decade, this tightly focused examination reveals underappreciated aspects of an artist long regarded as Surrealism's greatest and most lyrical painter-poet.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.