Short answers, pulled from the story.
Joan Miró i Ferrà was born on the 20th of April 1893 in Barcelona, Spain. He was Catalan, grew up in the Barri Gòtic neighborhood of Barcelona, and his Catalan identity shaped both his imagery and his politics throughout his career.
Miró is most closely associated with Surrealism; he joined the Surrealist group in 1924, and André Breton described him as "the most Surrealist of us all." His work also drew on Fauvism, Expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, and Color Field painting, and he refused formal membership in any single movement to remain free to experiment.
The Constellations are a series of twenty-three gouaches Miró created between 1940 and 1941 while living in Varengeville, Palma, and Mont-roig during his exile from German-occupied France. Built around celestial symbolism, the series earned praise from André Breton, who wrote a set of poems named after and inspired by the works seventeen years later.
Miró created a tapestry for the World Trade Center in New York City in 1974, together with Catalan artist Josep Royo. It was displayed in the building and was one of the most expensive works of art lost during the September 11 attacks.
Miró's paintings sell today for between US$250,000 and US$26 million. In 2012, Painting-Poem (1925) sold at Christie's London for $26.6 million, and Femme et Oiseaux (1940), one of the Constellations, sold at Sotheby's London on the 21st of June 2017 for 24,571,250 GBP.
Miró experienced episodes of depression throughout his life, beginning with a serious breakdown at age eighteen in 1911 that kept him bedridden for three months. He used painting as a way to manage depression and said that without it he became "very depressed, gloomy" and got "black ideas." His painting Carnival of the Harlequin is understood as a direct expression of mental chaos; the ladder symbol appearing in it and later works is said to represent escape.