PABLO PICASSO: STRUCTURES OF INVENTION. THE UNITY OF A LIFE’S WORK

• On 19 March the Palacio de Buenavista’s galleries will inaugurate the seventh remodelling of the museum’s collection since it opened twenty years ago. Around 150 works by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) will be presented with the title “Pablo Picasso: Structures of Invention. The Unity of a Life’s Work“.

• This new presentation aims to demonstrate the overarching unity of Picasso’s oeuvre rather than the division of his art into discrete periods or styles. Thus, until the Spring of 2027 the Palacio de Buenavista’s galleries will feature paintings, sculptures, drawings, ceramics and graphic works, which will create a context that reveals new connections among Picasso’s works and challenge traditional classifications.

• This new display has been devised under the academic supervision of Michael FitzGerald, Kluger Family Professor of Art History at Trinity College, Hartford (USA), and in collaboration with the Fundación Almine y Bernard-Ruiz-Picasso (FABA).

For the next three years the galleries of the Museo Picasso Málaga will be showing the exhibition "Pablo Picasso: Structures of Invention. The Unity of a Life’s Work". For the seventh time in the museum’s existence, thanks to a close collaboration between the Museo and the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, the works on display in the galleries will be changed in order to show around 150 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.
 
Michael FitzGerald, Kluger Family Professor of Art History at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, (USA), who is the curator of this latest transformation of the museum, has said that “Picasso’s creativity arose from two apparently opposing inspirations: innovation and retrospection”, and also that “the interplay of these two concepts defines the creative pathways that enabled him to weave together cubism, classicism, surrealism and his other innovations into the unity of a life’s work.”
 
Based on these insights, the new installation has been devised to involve the viewer in the artist’s creative process and to stimulate our imagination, mapping a new understanding of the work of this great master and creator. In addition, five “Focus Exhibitions”, curated by young scholars involved in the FABA Research Program, will be placed in the galleries in order to present in-depth studies of issues central to Picasso’s artistic development. These topics will range from his relationship to African sculpture (and include African works from Picasso’s own collection), to his paintings on wooden panels, his return to sculpture in plaster in the 1930s, his responses to life in Paris during World War II, and the huge mural he painted in 1957-58 for the headquarters of UNESCO in Paris.
 
“Pablo Picasso: Structures of Invention. The Unity of a Life’s Work “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 Málaga 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.