Fantastic characters - Joan Miró

This strange duo of half-fantastic, half-familiar characters in bright colours (blue, yellow and red) marks, from its twelve metres high, the entrance to Westfield Les Quatre-Temps. The duo was installed before the opening of the shopping centre.

In this artwork, we find Miró's predilection for highly colourful universes, with fanciful, ill-defined forms, a thumbnail's nose at the conformism of everyday life. His unclassifiable artwork shows absolute plastic freedom, unbridled inventiveness at the limits of the imagination, and propels us into "a truly phantasmagorical world of living monsters", in his words.

These two Fantastic characters represent an unstable balance between the childlike joy of the moment and the disturbing strangeness of destiny. They are made of polyester resin.

A word about the artist

Joan Miró was born to a father who was a jeweller in 1893. He became passionate about art at an early age. He studied at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts and then at the Galli Academy.

In 1919, he went to Paris and met the greatest artists of his time. He was first influenced by Fauvism, then Cubism before joining André Breton's Surrealist group. Of all the genres, it was Dadaism that particularly upset him. In his painting, sculpture and collages, he shows great imagination, humour and fantasy to give new life to the objects and forms that surround him. He died in 1983.