Joan Miró – Exhibition Catalogue

JOAN MIRÓ MATERIALITY

AND METAMORPHOSIS

Exhibition Catalogue

After a long decision process, the Joan Miró collection – owned by the Portuguese State – found a permanent home at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, in Porto. It contains roughly 80 works of the Catalan artist, mostly exploring processes of metamorphosis and transformations in Miró's language and mediums. Robert Lubar Messeri was invited to curate the exhibition, and we had the priviledge of designing its catalogue.

catalog book editorial non-verbal Serralves Museum of contemporary art book design

The premises for this project were quite simple. We were asked to design a classic and low tone catalogue, consisting of three differentiated moments: 1. Robert Messeri's essay on the importance of this collection in Miró's body of work; 2. a section with photographs of the works in display following Robert's organisation in six sub-sections; 3. a chronological list of the works.

The first third of the book is composed by the curator's text. It is an academic essay with a complex structure, containing several quotes and notes, and it presented the design challenge of finding a way for it to run simultaneously in two languages (Portuguese and English) without repeating the imagery used to illustrate the information.

The second and third sections are a lot more straightforward in its approach.

For the work reproduction section, our biggest concern was to create a very calm visual environment for the works to be seen. We've designed a simple structure using generous margins that provided a comfortable frame of white space, making room for short narratives that allow the reader to draw connections between pieces of work.

The third and final section contains a list of the works in chronological order, in a split structure between two columns of image thumbnails and one text column, set over a
grey background.

We've chosen a modernist approach and style to display the work of a modernist artist, focusing the design decisions on making room for the texts and images to be easily read and understood. An offset paper was used on the first and third section for comfort, while the second section is printed on a coated volume paper for image reproduction.