Reflections

Reflections. Picasso × Barceló forms part of the series of exhibitions entitled Reflections. Picasso ×, a project from the Museo Picasso Málaga that, in collaboration with Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (FABA) and the Andalusian Regional Government, aims to establish dialogues between Pablo Picasso and artists from different times and contexts.

This second chapter, presented at the Museo de Almería, brings together ceramic works by Pablo Picasso and Miquel Barceló with pieces from the museum’s archaeological collections, creating an encounter between art, archaeology, and matter.

The dialogue is articulated through one of the oldest and most universal creative mediums: ceramics. In Vallauris, after World War II, Picasso found a laboratory of invention in clay that combined painting, sculpture, and objects, transforming plates and pots into bodies, mythological figures, and everyday scenes. For his part, Barceló came to ceramics in the 1990s during his stay in Mali, where he learned traditional techniques and conceived of clay as a territory for experimentation in which ritual, the corporeal, and the material converge.

Between the archaeological pieces from Almería and the works by both artists, the exhibition establishes a transhistorical dialogue in which practices separated by millennia are recognized within a single creative impulse.

Reflections. Picasso × Barceló invites us to understand ceramics as a universal language where the functional and the symbolic, the everyday and the transcendent, the material and the spiritual converge—a practice that, over the centuries, has transformed earth, water, and fire into enduring art.