Joan Miró (b. 1893, Barcelona, Spain; d. 1983, Palma, Mallorca, Spain) was a Catalan painter, sculptor and printmaker whose vocabulary of floating signs, stars, birds and organic shapes helped shape abstraction in the twentieth century. After settling in Paris in 1920 he joined the Surrealist group in 1924, using spontaneous drawing and chance to free his images from conventional representation. The Farm (1921 to 1922), a detailed portrait of his family's country property in Catalonia, was bought by Ernest Hemingway and now belongs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. His Constellations, a series of 23 gouaches made in 1940 and 1941, are among his most admired works.

Miró trained in Barcelona at the La Llotja school and at the art academy of Francesc Galí. For the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris he painted the mural The Reaper, shown near Picasso's Guernica. He received the Grand Prize for graphic work at the 1954 Venice Biennale, and in 1958 he won the Guggenheim International Award for his ceramic walls at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, made with the ceramicist Josep Llorens Artigas. The Museum of Modern Art in New York held a retrospective of his work in 1941. The Fundació Joan Miró opened in Barcelona in 1975, and his studios in Palma became the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró in 1981. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, the Centre Pompidou and the Museo Reina Sofía.