Captivated by the imaginative liberties Surrealism offered, Miró began experimenting in 1924 with the new idiom of automatic painting. The artist had been particularly struck by one of André Breton's precepts of Surrealism, that is, painting as "thought's dictation, all exercise of reason and every esthetic or moral preoccupation being absent." Previously, he had more or less painted objectively, utilizing descriptive forms based on actual experience or his dreams. Now the artist championed the technique of automatism leaving the origins of his paintings to chance and accident. These works, produced in Paris between 1925-1927, are often referred to as his "dream paintings." They were for Miró direct expressions of his dreams trapped at their source.

The differences between these and Miró's earlier
[paintings] were based on physical perceptions,
intermingled with sensations and emotions from
memory's stronghold, to be rendered in schematic yet
descriptive form. In contrast, Miró's first
properly Surrealist works...are inspired by a
'purely interior model' dictated sometimes by
accidents--blots or splotches that call forth
hallucinatory images--and sometimes by a state of
intentional self-relinquishment in which the artist
has no conscious control over creation.... 'I was
drawing almost entirely from hallucinations...
Hunger was a great source of these hallucinations
and I would sit for long periods looking at the
bare walls of my studio trying to capture those
shapes on paper or burlap." (M. Rowell, Miró,
New York, 1970, p. 14)

Miró had joined the Surrealist group in 1924 and had participated in the first Surrealist group exhibition at Galerie Pierre in 1925, by which time his work was beginning to elicit excited response and wide praise. He worked alongside other passionate Surrealists like Max Ernst, René Magritte, Jean Arp and the poet Paul Eluard.

In Au cirque, Miró uses a simple compositional scheme to create an enigmatic space with floating objects. This amusing fantasy landscape is dominated by a bulbous eye watching a meteor shower while a white gloved hand outlines a face on a long trajectory through the vast soft brown space. Though humor is an integral aspect of Surrealism, the amusing childlike simplicity and wit of the image is unique to Miró. His powerful gift of poetic suggestion is achieved through his inventive use of abstract forms freed from formal convention thus providing a fertile spontaneity of irrational association.