Organised within the framework of the international celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and curated by Éric Troncy, The Echo of Picasso relates Picasso’s œuvre to that of contemporary artists who, in one way or another, have made or are making its echo resound, including his friend Antoni Clavé with a superb tribute to El Greco, “Caballero sur fond noir”.
From the outset, Picasso’s work has ‘reverberated’ in the ears of several generations of artists, both during his lifetime and after his death, for all sorts of reasons. Every period has found new resonances in keeping with the ideas proposed by its artists. Those borne along by the logic of the twentieth-century avant-gardes have brought about stylistic developments inspired by those set in motion by Picasso, or have simply explored the possibilities offered by the representational strategies of Cubism with the clear ambition of confronting the fruits of Picasso’s exploration and creativity in order to eventually surpass them.
A number of these works from different periods carry the imprint of Picasso’s innovative techniques freed from stylistic constraints. These range from welded iron to painted bronze, and from collage to the use of everyday materials as supports or constitutive elements of an artwork. They also encompass ceramics, a technique which Picasso was one of the first to inscribe in the artistic language of the second half of the twentieth century.
Today, with the hypothetical end of the avant-gardes, and all the more now that figurative painting seems to have provisionally retrieved its credentials, Picasso’s extraordinary formal inventiveness, formidable stylistic freedom, scant interest in convention and compulsive creativity loom large over contemporary artists. He is probably the only artist so frequently cited, interpreted, evoked, reprised, commented and celebrated in the works of his contemporary and later peers.
‘No matter what, sooner or later there is an inevitable Picasso epiphany in every artist’s life.’ Marina Faust, 2023
Artists in the exhibition :
Karel Appel, Farah Atassi, Francis Bacon, Cristina BanBan, Miquel Barceló, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois, Brian Calvin, César, Antoni Clavé, George Condo, Timothy Curtis, José Dávila, Marina Faust, Genieve Figgis, Jorge Galindo & Pedro, Almodóvar, Jameson Green, Philip Guston, Peter Halley, Zhang Hongtu, Thomas Houseago, Marcus Jahmal, Nicolas Jasmin, Rashid, Johnson, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Martin Kippenberger, Willem de Kooning, Jeff Koons, Maria Lassnig, Sarah Lucas, Markus Lüpertz, M/M Paris, Nikki Maloof, Cristina de Miguel, Sarah Morris, Louise Nevelson, Pablo Picasso, Tobias Pils, Richard Prince, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, George Rouy, Louise Sartor, Antonio Saura, David Smith, Claire Tabouret, Henry Taylor, Genesis Tramaine, Tursic & Mille, Cy Twombly, Rebecca Warren, Tom Wesselmann, Franz West and Zio Ziegler.
The echo of Picasso, Museo Picasso Málaga 03/10/2023 – 31/03/2024