Joan Miró, Femme, oiseaux, étoile II, 1967

04 March 2026

Though seemingly abstract in form, Femme, oiseaux, étoile II is an articulation of three symbolic motifs that preoccupied Joan Miró throughout his life. Its title is an invitation to the viewer to identify them, hidden in plain sight among a bold and tangled shape that stands against a background of various coloured washes.

When it was painted, Miró was working primarily from his studio outside Palma de Mallorca, designed by his friend, the modernist architect Josep Lluís Sert and built around a decade earlier. As a proudly Catalan artist, whose work was often influenced by the history and folklore of Catalonia, his island studio provided him with a space to focus on making work away from the repressive Franco regime.

Representations of female figures, birds and stars are three foundations of Miró’s world of spiritual imagery, forming between them a link that draws together the heavens and the earth; dreams and waking reality. In his early work, they formed meticulous, tightly-composed configurations. Examples from the 1960s and onwards like this one demonstrate his evolution towards a looser style.

Whilst Miró’s early work was more straightforwardly figurative, as his career continued, he became increasingly interested in representing a side to the world not captured by figuration. Regarding the simplicity of his motifs, he commented, “represented in detail, they would lose their imaginary quality, which enhances everything.” [1] When André Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto, Miró was among the artists to sign it. From the outset, he stood out from the group for his tendency towards abstraction and interest in reducing symbols and images to their simplest, most essential forms. For these reasons, Breton later described him as “the most Surrealist of us all.”[2] Femme, oiseaux, étoile II demonstrates this unique, symbolic, abstracted strain of Surrealism.