Encompassing a broad range of styles and mediums, Joan Miró’s (1893-1983) prolific and radically inventive career shaped the course of modern art. But it was not until late in Miró’s storied career that he dedicated himself to the medium of sculpture, creating over three hundred bronzes between 1966 and his death in 1983. ranging from small-scale maquettes to monumental public commissions.  For most of his sculptures, Miró cast unexpected combinations of found objects in bronze, creating incongruous bust suggestive assemblages with a sense of wonder, humor, and poetry.

In the late 1960s, Miró experimented with his first painted bronze sculptures, taking the advice of the late sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who had advised him to add color to sculptures many years prior. Over the next decade, Miró cast nineteen bronzes glossily painted in bright, primary colors; his first painted bronzes were cast at the Fonderie Clémenti and at Susse Fondeur between 1967 and 1969, a second group of painted sculpture was cast at the Valsuani foundry in the early 1970s. Using vibrant shades of ripolin, a commercial, ready-mixed enamel paint, Miró painted each of the discrete elements of his assemblages in different colors, drawing attention to each sculpture’s constituent components

In his painted bronzes, Miró whimsically combines found objects, frequently featuring visual puns with their forms and witty references in their titles. In Homme et femme dans la nuit from 1969, Miró takes two common chair stools as his subject, playfully anthropomorphizing the couple into a man and a woman. As the title, translated in English to Man and Woman in the Night, humorously suggests, we should read the pair of stools as a couple making love—the woman on her back as the blue stool, and the man as the black one.