Miró’s Studio review – hallucinatory shop window for the surrealist's later works

Mayoral gallery, London
Recreation of the painter’s Mallorca studio is a tasteful homage, showing Miró moving beyond political dissent to something less cutting-edge – cosy even

First there was Euro Disney. Then there was Legoland. Now comes a new kind of European theme park for art lovers – a recreation in London of the great surrealist Joan Miró’s studio, complete with biomorphic dodgems, a political rollercoaster and mirrors that make you look like a line, a dot and a star.

Well, not quite. In fact Miró’s Studio is basically just an art exhibition. Mayoral gallery in St James’s has “recreated” the studio that Miró had built for himself in Mallorca in the 1950s. The Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert was behind Miró’s grand design – a big, luminous, private space where Miró worked happily and fruitfully until his death in 1983. Yet far from a postmodern simulacrum of Sert’s coolly adventurous architecture (he and Miró had been friends since Sert designed the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, for which Picasso painted Guernica), this is a tasteful homage.

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