Ben Pawlowski
A NEW exhibition has opened at the Picasso Museum in Malaga with over 140 works of art that “together reveal Picasso’s extraordinary ability to create the innovative structures that made him one of the most influential artists of the modern period”.
The latest display from the museum, which showcases some of the best works from Malaga’s finest son, is called Pablo Picasso: Structures of Invention – The Unity of a Life’s Work.
The revamped presentation opened on Tuesday evening with an inaugural talk from the curator, Michael Fitzgerald, Professor of Art History at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, US.
The event also featured presentations highlighting the five spotlight exhibitions within the re-arranged gallery: Picasso and African Sculpture; Picasso on wood; Plaster Sculptures of the 1930s; From Studio to Salon – Picasso and the Liberation of Paris; The Path to Creation: The UNESCO Mural.
In a break from traditional artistic convention, the works displayed in the exhibition have been organised by theme rather than chronology.
The museum’s website says: “The installation will thus reveal the coherence of the artist’s output, moving away from conventional interpretations, which have classified it by periods, by displaying works from different decades of his career alongside each other in many of the museum’s galleries”.
“Through this combination of periods and also of techniques – painting, sculpture, ceramics, drawing and graphic art – the Museo Picasso Malaga will present connections that illustrate the ways in which the artist’s astonishing creativity was rooted in both his previous creations and his most recent innovations”.
The display – which will run until March 2027 – features 141 works that Picasso, widely regarded as one of Spain’s greatest ever artists, kept for himself.
10 of those pieces have never been seen before in Spain, whilst two-thirds of the art exhibited is new to the museum, a popular tourist attraction in the heart of Andalucia’s second most populous city.
Among the never-before-seen works is Paul (The Artist’s Son), which has only ever been showcased twice, Woman Leaning on Her Elbow, a sculpture assembled in plaster, and a sketchbook which Picasso used to plan the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, one of his finest works.
The other exhibition currently running at the museum is The Echo of Picasso, a display organised with the framework of international celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s death.
The presentation demonstrates Picasso’s pertinent influence on artistic trends and movements, in particular Cubism.
Prior to his death in 1973, Picasso was widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, with his most famous work, the dramatic and powerful anti-war painting Guernica, the current centrepiece of the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.
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