Acquavella Galleries Opens New Online Viewing Rooms

Acquavella Galleries Opens New Online Viewing Rooms:
Sculpture by Joan Miró, Drawings by Jacob El Hanani,
And a Selection of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary Masterworks

Acquavella Galleries is pleased to announce the opening of three new online viewing rooms, with presentations dedicated to sculpture by Joan Miró, drawings by Jacob El Hanani, and a selection of Impressionist, modern and contemporary masterworks. Please click here to visit the digital exhibitions.

Refusing to limit himself to one discipline, Joan Miró’s (1893-1983) art took many forms—from painting, drawing, and printmaking to ceramics and sculpture. His work was characterized by a lifelong love of experimentation with materials and processes. Working across media, he developed a unique visual vocabulary of imaginative forms that represented the artist’s private, poetic universe. Throughout his career, Miró’s profound connection with the landscape, first at the small Catalan town of Mont-roig and later at Mallorca, decisively influenced his life and work.

It was not until late in Miró’s storied career that he dedicated himself to the medium of sculpture. Inspired by the challenges of the new medium, Miró devoted much of his later years to the discipline, particularly from the late 1960s onwards. The artist created over three hundred bronzes between 1966 and his death in 1983. Unflagging in his aim to explore and redefine the medium, at age 81, Miró shared his enthusiasm with his friend Alexander Calder: “I am an established painter but a young sculptor.”

For five decades, Jacob El Hanani (born 1947) has produced painstakingly detailed pen-and-ink drawings composed of countless microscopic marks woven into all-over abstractions.

Employing a range of forms—from minuscule linear strokes to tiny circles to elegantly written letters of the Hebrew alphabet and densely crosshatched lines—El Hanani’s innumerable marks are fluidly strung and linked into evocative patterns. Despite their apparent abstraction, his drawings are often suggestive of atmospheric landscapes, aerial views or topographical maps, carefully woven textiles, and celestial bodies.

Exactingly made by hand in the unforgiving medium of ink on paper, El Hanani’s drawings are achieved through extraordinary self-discipline. Working without a magnifying glass in ten-minute stints—the artist has to take breaks to rest his eyes—these drawings often take months to complete, marking the passage of time and the limits of human endurance.