Brossa's poetry, in its entirety, is full of references to the visual domain. Perhaps this explains why Brossa was also engaged in the world of plastic arts. Right from the beginning (1941), he wrote experimental calligramme poems. The first object "Escorça"dates from 1943, a veritable object trouvé.The first object expressly created from two different realities (in this case, a hammer and a two-part letter) dates from 1951. However, it is after 1959 that he begins to intensify his visual questing with his Suites de poesia visual. visual (Suites of Visual Poetry). In these fragile compositions is the seed of many subsequent visual poems. It was in the 1960s, and more concretely in the 1970s, that the best-known visual and object poems of Brossa were conceived and subsequently published. The subject material is that of his other poems: socio-political denunciation, a reflection on the meaning of words and things, surprising games, etc.. However, the substance is not only words but letters and other elements, loved by Brossa, as by Fregoli, the Carnival, sleight of hand, and so on.

After his 1986 exhibition in the Fundació Miró, Joan Brossa o les paraules són les coses (Joan Brossa or Words are Things), and his 1991 anthological exhibition at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the poet became well-known both inside and outside of Spain. This permitted him to embark upon more complex projects which became installations, what he called corporeal poems, or interventions in urban spaces. The exhibition Joan Brossa o la revolta poètica (Joan Brossa or the Poetic Revolt), held in the Fundació Miró in 2001, represented a synthesis of the diversity of Joan Brossa's projects in plastic expression.

Again, the remarkable range of the poet's interests and his extensive knowledge led him also to produce posters, a terrain in which Brossa would become an indisputable reference (see the catalogue of his posters Brossa Cartells 1975-1999).