The Eye's Music presents the original lithographs and etchings of Joan Miró and Terry Frost. Connected through the mutual influence of Federico Garcia Lorca and the allusive quality of the duende, the two 20th century pioneers stand well together.

Their work is seldom compared. Critics have chosen in the past to look at them respectively within their own creative circles: Miró in Spain and Paris with the Surrealists, Frost In St Ives with the abstractionists. The men were working two generations apart, and it is apparent in their work. Miró was developing his visual language amongst the explosive shifts of Cubism; Frost's practice evolved with Constructivism and Abstract Expressionism.

Characteristically the two men were not alike. The American critic Clement Greenberg describes Miró, as "a short, compact, rather dapper man in a dark blue business suit. He has a neat, round head with closely trimmed dark hair, pale skin, small, regular features, quick eyes and movements. He is slightly nervous and at the same time impersonal in the company of strangers, and his conversation and manner are non-committal to the extreme."

Compare this to a description of Frost by his friend, the maverick painter John Hoyland: "What a joy it was to occasionally find Terry sitting in Mulligans Bar in Cork Street, with a red beret, green glasses and a pint of Guinness that he would dilute with champagne. He would be talking wide-eyed about the moonlight coming through the trees on a hillside in Provence. He would be talking of ellipses and eclipses, the sun, the moon and the stars – and about last night at the Chelsea Art Club."

Clearly the artists did not share a social temperament. Through the connection of Lorca, however, the similarities between the two men become urgent.

Lorca was a Spanish poet whose writing is recognised as among the best the country has produced. The mysterious circumstances of his death during the Spanish Civil War account, in part, for his recognition outside of Spain, but time has proven his writing to rest on surer ground than mere sensationalism.

Frost began reading Lorca's poetry in the 1970s, a lasting affair that led to the completion of Lorca Suite in 1989.

Frost writes: "Lorca is so simple, and so direct, and so full of colour and ideas. I was so much in love with the poetry at that time."

Miró and Lorca were contemporaries in Spain. Both of them influenced creatively by the build up to the civil war in their native country, and in Miró's case, the war itself and its consequences.

Frost served in the Second World War and actually began his creative education in a POW camp. Both artists were liberated by the developments of Cubism, which allowed a non-representational experience of reality and later led to the abstraction which they developed during their careers. As Lorca observed: "With the appearance of the first Cubist canvas an abyss is created between new painting and old."

They are in fact obvious artists to present together, an idea reinforced by the critical literature surrounding their practice, which is virtually interchangeable.

Poetry played a vital role in the development of Miró's abstract compositions.

He did not recognise a difference between painting and poetry. This is apparent in many of his paintings and prints when, like Frost, he blurs the frequently rigid divide between image and text.

Reminiscing about his first year in Paris having left his Catalan roots, Miró describes meeting "practically all the young poets of the day" and the influence they had on him: "[they] interested me more than the painters I had met in Paris. I was carried away by the new ideas they brought and especially the poetry they discussed. I gorged myself on it all night long."

Frost had an affectionate relationship with poetry as well, observing in an interview with Dominic Kemp that "I think I have been more influenced by poetry than I realise."

In 1949 he painted his first abstract while still a student at Camberwell. Adrian Heath, a great mentor to the artist, remembers seeing it at his flat in Battersea and being told of the inspiration, a WH Auden poem, O lurcher-loving collier black as night.

Of his relationship with Lorca's poetry he writes: "With Lorca I travel on a ride to no-man's-land. There I am; my emotions take on a new distance and the extent between life and death becomes forever. Black and Red become a symbol for death and life, lust, passion, tenderness, fear, love."

Miró draws directly from the poetry of Rafael Alberti for the work in the current show. The Maravillas (Marvels) series are inspired by a collection of Alberti's poems. Lorca and Alberti were contemporaries and "kindred spirits", having met at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. A centre of radical ideas and debate, the college nurtured plenty of distinguished 20th century figures. The relationship between Alberti, Lorca, Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel was depicted in the 2009 biopic Little Ashes.

John Hoyland describes in Frost's paintings a "distinctive vocabulary of universal signs". Elemental and organic shapes, from the reverie of a sun to the sickle shape of boats in the harbour, are playfully arranged in his work without hierarchy, but in splendid harmony.

This relates to one of Miró's enduring principles within his own image making. He explains: "Just as the whole of a body is similar to its parts – an arm, a hand, a foot – everything in a painting must be homogenous. In my paintings, there is a kind of circulatory system. If even one form is out of place, the circulation stops; the balance is broken."

It is precisely this "homogenisation" that both artists achieve so masterfully, with the well-practised appearance of ease. Balance within art and life was understandably something both men gravitated towards, living and learning their vocations in unstable conditions.

One critic notes that "Terry came to painting when colours were dark, when Europe was in rubble."

Miró was formulating his artistic identity and political allegiances a decade earlier during extreme political shifts in his own country.

An aptitude and desire for balance surely contributed to both men's enjoyment of the print process. It affords a flatness of colour and a democratic quality of mark making which encourages these results.

The weight of line in Miró's lithographs for example varies in thickness but their application on the paper is as even as newspaper type.

Frost, talking specifically of the woodcut process, about a commission with Hugh Stoneman, the same printmaker he collaborated with on Lorca Suite, said: "The colour and pressure you can obtain are different to what you can get with acrylic paint. So all the time I'm working with the prints I'm making adjustments."

In 1938 Miró declared: "I would like to try sculpture, pottery, engraving, and to have a printing press. To try to go further than easel painting which in my opinion sets itself a narrow aim – to try to go as far as possible."

This statement summarises a uniting signature of both artists. A new process means a new possibility; a new material means a new way to play.

Nowhere is this principle more apparent than in the artists' prints.