This work perfectly reflects the world of fantasy and imagination underlying Miró’s iconography and style.

The famous Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker and ceramist decided at the age of eighteen to devote himself to painting, in a climate dominated by the latest French artistic trends, thus initiating a great body of work based on an equilibrium between expression and experimentation, synthesising and and combining the real with an abstraction that originated in his contact with Surrealism — in which he was an active participant — and was later to develop into .

In Gat i ma Miró continues to embody his aesthetic concerns in a very personal iconography of signs. On a neutral background, an infinite, limitless space, a black cat is poised in a dominant position, encircling a multicoloured bird. The cat’s disproportionately large eye seems to devour its prey, whose oval eye expresses naivety and tenderness. To curtail this obvious scenario, the painter/poet’s hand tries to restore peace — a shamanic hand, with deep roots in Palaeolithic art, which guarantees respect and inviolability.

Another recurrent sign in Miró’s work also appears here: the eight-point star dominating the scene, a symbol of peace and eternity, which here reinforces the action of that saving hand preserving the bird from its fate.

Whilst the brushstroke of the cat aims to create a feeling of impulse, the bird is static, structured in uniform areas of using a chromatic palette of primary colours augmented by green, and delimited by a black frame which accentuates and sublimates the composition.

The reverse is also worked. There are some perforations, indicating that this drawing may have served as a model for an engraving or a lithograph. It represents a typical Miró head with its eye wide open staring at an arrow pointing towards the sky. Miró left his right handprint in Indian ink next to an eight-point star.