Fundació Joan Miró Barcelona

The Joan Miró Foundation was the first public institution set up in Barcelona to focus entirely on contemporary art. Joan Miró and Josep Lluís Sert – its designer, a founder member of GATCPAC (a leading group in the introduction of the Modern architecture in Catalonia) – had first met in 1932. They became close friends while working for the Spanish (Republican) Pavilion at the Paris World Fair in 1937. After the first big retrospective of the work of Joan Miró in Barcelona (1968), the artist decided to set up a building to make his work accessible to the public on a permanent basis. Sert was commissioned,and created an open-plan structure where the interior space communicated with the exterior, producing a perfect balance between architecture and landscape. From these dates, the Foundation was expanded twice, and the architect commissioned to carry out this task was Jaume Freixa, a pupil of Sert’s who had worked with him for eleven years at Harvard and had played an active part in the creation of the Foundation.