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Joan Miró was born April 20, 1893 in Barcelona. He studied at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts and the Academia Galí and in 1918 set up his first individual exhibition in the Dalmau Galleries in the same city. His works before 1920 reflect the influence of different trends, like the pure and brilliant colors used in Fauvism, shapes taken from cubism, influences from folkloric Catalan art and Roman frescos from the churches.

Miró moved to Paris in 1920, where, under the influence of surrealist poets and writers, he evolved his mature style. He drew on memory, fantasy, and the irrational to create works of art that are visual analogues of surrealist poetry. The forms of his paintings are organized against flat neutral backgrounds and are painted in a limited range of bright colors, especially blue, red, yellow, green, and black. Amorphous amoebic shapes alternate with sharply drawn lines, spots, and curlicues, all positioned on the canvas with seeming nonchalance. Miró later produced highly generalized, ethereal works in which his organic forms and figures are reduced to abstract spots, lines, and bursts of colors. He also experimented in a wide array of other media, devoting himself to etchings and lithographs for several years in the 1950s and also working in watercolor, pastel, collage, paint on copper and masonite. His ceramic sculptures are especially notable, in particular his two large ceramic murals for the UNESCO building in Paris (Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun, 1957-59).

The Joan Miró Foundation Center of Contemporary Art Study was officially opened in the city of Barcelona in 1976. And in 1979 he was named Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Barcelona.

Joan Miró died in Majorca, Spain, on December 25, 1983.