Poster with representation of the painting "Apparitions" by Miró, alluding to the exhibition “Materiality and Metamorphosis”, on display at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art from October 1, 2016 to June 4, 2017.

The exhibition, entitled 'Joan Miró: Materiality and Metamorphosis', was curated by Robert Lubar Messeri, a leading world expert on Miró's work, and had an exhibition project by Álvaro Siza Vieira. The show spans a six-decade period of Joan Miró's career, from 1924 to 1981.

Included around 80 works by Joan Miró (from the set of 85 works in the Collection) mostly unknown to the public, including six of her paintings on masonite from 1936 and also six sobreteixims from 1973.

Miró's visual thinking, the way he works with sensations that vary between the tactile and the optical, and the elaboration processes of his works are observed in detail.

Over a career that spanned more than six decades of creative activity, Joan Miró developed a formal language that transformed 20th century art.

In painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, tapestry and printing, Miró explored the language of signs, aligning his project with the interest of Cubists in the structure of representation and in the surrealist investigation of writing and poetry.

Conceiving of his work as peinture-poésie (painting-poetry), the Catalan artist forged a language-based aesthetic whose legacy influenced a whole generation of postwar artists in Europe and America.