Organized by the Tate Modern and the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, with the support of the Institut Ramon Llull, the exhibition closed on Sunday having received a number of visitors that makes it the sixth-most-visited major exhibition to be held at the Tate Modern since it opened in 2000. Of the fifty-seven major exhibitions the Tate Modern has organised so far, the most visited have been Matisse Picasso, Edward Hopper, Gauguin: Maker of Myth, Frida Kahlo and Mark Rothko.
For those who have not been able to go to London to see it, Joan Miró: L'escala de l'evasió can be seen at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona from 14 October and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in May 2012.
The Joan Miró exhibition at the Tate Modern in London formed the core of the cycle Miró & Catalan Culture-organised by the Institut Ramon Llull in coordination with some of the UK capital's leading venues and festivals to highlight some examples of modern Catalan culture-which took place from February to September 2011. Twenty or so events were held in all.
Apart from hosting the largest exhibition of Joan Miró's work to be seen in the United Kingdom in the last fifty years, the Tate Modern was also the venue for the symposium "Art and Politics", with the participation of Frederic Amat, Robert Lubar and Willian Jeffrett, together with the curators of the show, Marko Daniel and Matthew Gale; Jon Bird, Gill Perry, Nigel Warburton and Eva Bosch. Amongst the notable activities that took place at the gallery were the sessions that revealed the artist's relations with film-makers such as Pere Portabella and artists such as Joan Baixas.
In the field of the visual arts, the cycle included Jaume Plensa at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the artist's most significant exhibit in the United Kingdom, which receives almost a thousand visitors a day and is open until January 2012. The Institut Ramon Llull has supported the organization of sessions about the artist: a talk by Jaume Plensa about his work and a seminar led by the curators of the park and Laurie Peake, programming director of the Liverpool Art Biennale. This will take place 23 and 24 of September and will bring the cycle Miró & Catalan Culture to a close.
An outstanding feature of the cycle was the dance programme at the Sadler's Wells Theatre, regarded as one of the world's leading dance theatres. Performances by Tap Olé, Nats Nuts and Sol Picó were great hits with audiences. A review in Metrolife of Tap Olé's show Tapeando, observed, "Watching the four Tap Olé dancers [...] you wonder why no one had struck on the idea of fusing tap dance and Spanish classical guitar before. It's a marriage made in heaven, an entirely organic combination of rhythm and syncopation".
The comprehensive musical programming was a major feature of the cycle. It ranged from a performance by the pianist Agustí Fernández, to the music of Jordi Savall, and included Catalan Jazz Nights, two evenings when London's 606 Club was packed with people who had come to hear performances by the Biel Ballester Trio, Carles Benavent Quartet, CSM (Colina-Sambeat-Miralta) and the Miquel Fernández Quartet. Jazzwise, the UK's biggest-selling jazz paper, observed, "Catalan jazz has a distinctive Mediterranean inflection capturing an amalgam of post-bebop jazz and local folk-inspired music and the nights at the 606 are set to reveal a snapshot of some of the best Catalan groups currently on the circuit".
The musical events in the cycle were not confined to the British capital: the groups Aias, Les Aus and Mishima took part in Catalan Pop on Tour, with concerts at prestigious festivals and venues such as The Great Escape in Brighton, Liverpool Sound City and the Bull and Gate in London.
"Gravity" was a remarkable cross-frontier project, a coproduction between the Greenwich + Docklands festival and FiraTàrrega, in which eight English, Catalan and Balearic theatre companies came together in a work including dance, theatre, circus and installation, which was inspired by the force of gravity and was performed at two festivals This show opened the English festival, at which the Mar Gómez dance company also performed.
