Picasso: Untitled features fifty works from the final period viewed through the gaze of fifty contemporary national and international artists.
Presented by La Casa Encendida and curated by Eva Franch i Gilabert, the Picasso: Untitledexhibition is a project organised by La Casa Encendida and Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte (FABA) as part of the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of Pablo Picasso's death.
As Bernard Ruiz-Picasso says, “Picasso never gave his works a name; his friends, agents and curators did it for him.” Based on this premise, the fifty works on display, each with a new title and description proposed by a guest artist, are transformed, interrogated and resignified through parallel stories that offer a radically contemporary perspective of Picasso’s work. Collectively, the new titles and exhibit labels—some produced through speculative processes, other through poetic or political interpretations—construct a narrative composed of our modern perceptions and the legacy and influence of Picasso.
Unlike the work he produced in the first five decades, Pablo Picasso’s later works do not lend themselves to any immediate political or formal considerations. Condemned academically by western critics—possibly for ideological rather than aesthetic reasons—and celebrated by artists in search of new freedoms, the work from Picasso’s final period is open to multiple interpretations. Closer in time to us and yet the least known, this period is subjected in this exhibition to a process of dialogue with contemporary artists who have been invited to rename his works as a way of reaffirming those latter years and placing them in the context of a present and also future space.
As philosopher Jacques Derrida would say, renaming is an act of love. Renaming is also a political act. The exhibition Picasso: Untitled invites us to look—which is also to think—beyond the known titles and representational interpretations of Picasso’s work. The project encourages us to play with Picasso by opening up spaces to consider underlying themes in his work that are present in our modern gaze, such as race, class, gender, identity, anthropocentrism and empowerment.
The exhibition invites visitors to develop an active attitude, to interrogate aspects of our perception of Picasso’s work and at the same time to question our perception of ourselves, our values and our contemporaneity.
The guest artists featured in the exhibition include Adrián Villar Rojas, Agnieszka Kurant, Ahmet Öğüt, Albert Serra, Alejandro Cesarco, Antoni Muntadas, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Black Quantum Futurism, Cabello / Carceller, Camille Henrot, Christine Sun Kim, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, DIS, El Conde de Torrefiel, Emilie Baltz, Erwin Wurm, Esther Ferrer, Frida Orupabo, Holly Herndon, Isabel Coixet, Iván Argote, Janaina Tschäpe, Jill Magid, Joy Harjo, Johanna Hedva, Jumana Manna, Klára Hosnedlová, Leonor Serrano-Rivas, Lydia Ouhramane, María Hassabi, Mercedes Azpilicueta, Niño de Elche, OMSK Social Club, ORLAN, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Pedro Neves Marques, Pol Taburet, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Roméo Mivekannin, Ryan Gander, Sara Ramo, Simon Denny, Simon Fujiwara, Sissel Tolaas, Tala Madani, Taryn Simon, The Otolith Group, Trevor Paglen, Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Tyra Tingleff.
This exhibition is a project of La Casa Encendida and the Almine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Foundation for Art (FABA). It is curated by Eva Franch i Gilabert.
