Picasso

_Picasso Memory and Desire _reflects on the system of images and its relationship with the evolution of the modern subject in the work of Picasso and his contemporaries. The exhibition’s concept is based on a work by the artist, Study with Plaster Head of 1925 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), which so impressed Dalí and Lorca; a work that has been considered to represent a ‘dividing line’ in Picasso’s output and in the evolution of his artistic personality due to the manner in which it reflects on the passing of time and history. In synergy with the Surrealist atmosphere of the time, Picasso’s painting reveals that an era is not a fixed mental universe but a complex articulation of times, cultural references and life experiences.

Through his plaster figures, Picasso alludes to the Fine Arts system and evokes ‘the father figure.’ But the plaster bust at the centre of the painting splits into several profiles, revealing its disturbing shadow. Picasso transformed this multifaceted image into both a psychic emblem of the divided subject and a metaphor for the past that engages in a dialogue with the present. Heterogeneity articulates the experience of the everyday, and for Picasso this is the place of memory. But memory is only brought into the present by desire; desire understood not only as a drive but as an inextinguishable will to live and transform. Picasso thus transformed the plaster bust into an emblem, tracing it through sensuality, creative achievement, the aesthetic of the telluric and the threat of the monster, and finally identifying it with the vernacular symbols of Spanish culture.

The exhibition brings together key figures of 20th-century art such as Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and René Magritte, while also including Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca’s interpretation of Picasso’s work.