The Sun Embracing the Lover 1952

Joan Miró painted ‘The Sun Embracing the Lover’ with oil on canvas, and honestly, you can feel the symbolic weight of that title just looking at it. The colors here are so contained, almost shy, but somehow really bold too: muted greens, yellows, reds, all bordered in black lines. Imagine Miró, carefully building up the forms, one shape at a time, like a kind of visual poetry. It’s playful, but he’s also wrestling with something, you can tell by the way the lines never quite meet, or the colors bleed a little. There's that wonky yellow semi-circle – is that the sun? The Lover is anyone's guess. I see echoes of Matisse and maybe even some Kandinsky, but really, Miró is in a world of his own. It’s like he's inviting us to dream along with him, piecing together a story from these abstract shapes. I'm left wondering if all artists are, in some way, lovers embracing the sun.