Joan Miró is the surrealist artist known for biomorphic forms and the painting The Harlequin’s Carnival.
Miró painted The Harlequin’s Carnival in 1924–1925, during the formative years of Surrealism. The oil painting fills its canvas with floating shapes, musical symbols, animals, ladders and fantastical figures, turning a carnival scene into a dreamlike world.
His biomorphic style used organic, often ambiguous forms that seem part creature, part object and part abstract mark. Miró drew on automatism—the Surrealist effort to access the unconscious—but he was not simply an imitator of André Breton’s movement. Breton famously called him “the most Surrealist of us all,” although Miró resisted being confined to a single artistic label.
A common mix-up is Salvador Dalí, whose name is more strongly associated with Surrealism in popular culture. Dalí did not paint The Harlequin’s Carnival; the work belongs to Miró and is held by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.