The Bird Nests in Bloom Fingers

The Bird Nests in Bloom Fingers is emblematic of Joan Miró’s broader sculptural practice in its unlikely combination of unrelated objects. Miró described his method as follows: “I just use things I find . . . I place the objects around the floor, and choose this or that.” The result of this approach is a sculptural language that inhabits a space between reality and dream. Here, a bird alights on fingers that spring forth from a hand waving us into the magical world of the artist’s imagination. A tree trunk becomes a torso, and an abstract, rectangular shape becomes a smiling face, into the back of which is incised an asterisk that serves as an allusion to the cosmos. This sculpture in particular makes vivid Miró’s belief that “a tree is not a tree, not something that belongs to the realm of vegetation, but something human, someone living.”