Miró had lived in Paris since 1920, where he had become a key member of the Surrealist group, but returned to Catalonia in 1940. From 1944 to 1950, he created a dozen small-scale major works featuring a series of characters, highly stylised heads and birds that he modelled in clay and reproduced in bronze and terracotta. Miró produced drawings, these plaster casts and small bronzes as studies for subsequent large-scale works. The sculptures are solid and rounded, with large protuberances and indentations, clefts and symbols. One of the main figures is an opulent woman, like a mother goddess, a figure that lies at the heart of Miró’s symbolic imaginary.