MIA’s distinctive abstract works reflect her interior life. The late Pierre Restany (the critic and curator who championed Yves Klein) wrote that MIA uses colour to express her emotions and that this enables her work to express the essence of what it means to be human.
‘Art does not reproduce what we see, rather it makes us see’ (Paul Klee)
THE MUSIC OF COLOUR
THE MUSIC OF COLOUR
‘Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting and… stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to ‘walk about’ in a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?’ (Wassily Kandinsky)
MIA is fascinated by the relationship between painting and music because music expresses our emotions more completely than any other art, a theme she explores in her long-standing series The Music of Colour.
The latest work in The Music of Colour is Chromasoul, a new Steinway Model D concert grand piano which MIA has transformed into a joyous celebration of music inspired by the natural world.
CHROMASOUL
Prints of Chromasoul are available for sale.
While MIA painted ‘Chromasoul’, her studio was filled with music inspired by nature, by Debussy, Richard Strauss, Bach, Vaughan Williams, Messaien and Domenico Zipoli, an 18th century Jesuit priest, who taught music to Guarani people in the region of Argentina where MIA was born.
‘Chromasoul’, the wonderful painted Steinway by María Inés Aguirre (MIA) marks a culminating moment in a tendency that is increasingly manifesting itself. The colours and forms she has discovered to clothe this superb instrument express the soul of the music that is performed on it. Rather than looking for ways to decorate an instrument, as most of her predecessors have done, she has looked for ways to express its inner spirit. (Edward Lucie-Smith, 2020)
In 2015 a leading heart surgeon invited MIA to sketch while he performed a by-pass operation. While operating, he said that opening someone’s heart was like opening the lid of a piano, because each heart has its own music. He added that he didn’t act consciously during an operation, but felt his fingers were guided by an outside energy. MIA was struck by the parallels with Paul Klee’s account of his working practice and the spontaneity of her own creative process.
‘Everything around me dissolves and interesting works emerge as if of their own accord. My hand is entirely the instrument of a distant sphere. It isn’t my head that is working, but something else, something higher, something somewhere more remote…’ (Paul Klee)
The inside of ‘Chromasoul’s’ lid therefore evokes open heart surgery and the music of our hearts.
Video of Julian Joseph playing his composition ‘Heartbeat’ on ‘Chromasoul’.
Dancing Soul
In 2010 MIA became artist in residence at Steinway & Sons in London, where she turned a piano which had been retired from concert use into Dancing Soul, an abstract 3D work which embodies the energy, colours and music of Les Ballets Russes.
