There is something quite extraordinary about living in Spain that, perhaps because it is so accessible to us, is very easy to take for granted. We are surrounded by an incredible amount of art, architecture and cultural history, and in many cases, you don't need to plan a trip or buy a ticket to experience it. You can simply walk through the city and come across something that people from all over the world would travel specifically to see. Joan Miró is a particularly good example of this. His work is part of the cultural landscape of Spain in a way that goes far beyond the walls of a museum, and being able to experience it so easily is something we don't think we appreciate enough.
Barcelona is obviously one of the best places to understand Miró. The Fundació Joan Miró gives you the opportunity to spend an entire afternoon surrounded by his work, from paintings and sculptures to drawings, ceramics, textiles and the many studies and sketches that reveal how his ideas developed. The collection contains more than 14,000 works, including thousands of preparatory drawings, and the building itself was designed by Josep Lluís Sert with the intention of creating a place where Miró's work could be properly experienced. It is difficult to separate the artist from the city, and equally difficult to spend time with his work in Barcelona without understanding how important that relationship was.
But you don't have to go into a museum to find him. You can come back to Madrid and encounter Miró simply by walking through the city. One of our favourite examples is Proalí, the sculpture located at the Museo de Escultura al Aire Libre de La Castellana, underneath the bridge connecting Juan Bravo and Eduardo Dato. The open-air museum was created to bring modern and abstract Spanish sculpture into the public space, and that idea still feels particularly relevant today. There is something very different about coming across a piece of art while going about your normal day rather than deliberately entering a museum to look for it. You can walk under the bridge, see the sculpture, stop for a few minutes, or simply continue on your way. There is no ticket, no reservation and no separation between the work and the city around it. It is just there, in Madrid.
A short distance away, there is another very different example of Miró's presence in the city. On the façade of the Palacio de Congresos de Madrid, facing Paseo de la Castellana, is a huge ceramic mosaic created by Miró and produced together with ceramicist Josep Llorens Artigas. Installed in 1980, the mural covers approximately 550 square metres and occupies a substantial part of the building. It is the kind of work that should probably make you stop in your tracks, yet because it has been there for decades, it can become part of the background of the city. People walk past it every day. Cars drive past it. Thousands of people probably see it without really seeing it.
That, in many ways, is what we find most interesting about the relationship between Miró and Spain. His work isn't only preserved as something from the past. It remains physically present in the places where people live, work and move around today. Barcelona has an entire foundation dedicated to his work, but Madrid also has pieces of his work integrated into the city itself. You don't necessarily need to be looking for art to find it. Sometimes you just need to pay a little more attention to what is around you.
We've been thinking about this quite a lot while working around the return of the Air Jordan 7 “Miró” and our own interpretation of what the Jumpman might look like through his eyes. It is easy to look at Miró through photographs, books or a screen and immediately recognise the shapes, colours and symbols that have become so associated with him. But the more time we spend looking at his work, the more we feel that there is something important that gets lost when you only see it reproduced. The scale of a sculpture, the texture of a ceramic surface, the way a colour changes depending on the light or the way a piece interacts with the architecture around it are all things that don't really translate through a photograph.
This is also why we wanted to keep the number of photographs in this story relatively small. We could have filled the page with images of Miró's work, but that would almost defeat the point. There is already an endless amount of his work available to look at online, and we don't think another collection of images is particularly useful when some of these pieces are sitting a short walk or drive away. We'd rather encourage our community to go and experience them in person. If you're in Barcelona, spend some time at the Fundació Joan Miró. If you're in Madrid, go under the Juan Bravo bridge and find Proalí, then continue down towards the Palacio de Congresos and take a proper look at the mural. Don't just photograph it and move on. Look at the scale, the materials and the relationship between the work and everything happening around it.
There is something particularly fortunate about being able to experience important work in this way. People travel across the world to see Miró, often planning entire trips around museums and exhibitions dedicated to his work. In Spain, we have the opportunity to encounter him in much more casual circumstances. We can decide to spend an afternoon with his work, but we can also stumble across it on our way somewhere else. That level of access is easy to overlook because it is normal to us, but it really isn't normal in most places.
Perhaps that is the real privilege of living here. Not simply having access to great art, but having so much of it become part of everyday life that we sometimes forget to stop and appreciate it. Miró is not only something to be studied in a book or recognised on a sneaker. His work is sitting in our cities, in our museums, on our buildings and in our public spaces. It has been there for decades and, if we take the time to look, it is still there waiting for us.
So rather than trying to bring all of that experience to you through a screen, we'd much rather invite you to go and see it for yourselves. We are incredibly fortunate to have this much of Miró so close to us, and it feels worth taking advantage of it. Go under the bridge. Walk down Castellana. Visit the foundation in Barcelona. Stand in front of the work for a while and see what you notice when you aren't looking at it through a phone.
Sometimes the best way to understand an artist is simply to stand in front of their work.
