Milan, at Mudec Picasso and primitive art

Il Mudec of Milan offers the public to read the very rich production of Pablo Picasso – from his early works to his later ones – in light of his love for “primitive” artistic sources, for “primitive” art. And she does it with the exhibition Picasso. The metamorphosis of the figure from February 22nd to June 30th. Over forty works by the Spanish master will be exhibited, including paintings, sculptures, together with 26 drawings and sketches of preparatory studies, from the precious Quaderno n. 7 granted by the Pablo Ruiz Picasso Foundation – Casa Natal Museum of Malaga.

Fundamental for this exhibition is the accompaniment in this absolutely peculiar and unprecedented journey of all the main Spanish museums that possess the most important collections of Picasso in what was always his homeland, Spain: primarily the Casa Natal of Malaga, but also the Picasso Museum in Barcelona and the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, as well as numerous private collectors.

Together with the contribution ofAdministration Picasso – presided over by his daughter Paloma Ruiz-Picasso – and his heirs, who believed in the 24 Ore Cultura exhibition project by confirming important loans, the exhibition Picasso. The metamorphosis of the figure It therefore ideally closes a long 2023 of celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the painter’s death with an exhibition that is strongly and deliberately ‘Spanish’ in the identity of the project, but ‘universal’ in the heart of Picasso’s artistic vision that it offers to the public.

The project will also be an opportunity to see the show hosted at Mudec again after years Naked woman of the Museo del Novecento in Milan, a wonderful painting that was a fundamental prelude to Picasso’s masterpiece The Ladies of Avignon, in dialogue with magnificent mask paintings. In a game of mirrors and references that looks from the most remote past to the contemporary, the selection of the Spanish master’s production presented in the exhibition is in dialogue with a corpus of ancient sources and archaeological and ethnographic finds.́

The Mudec exhibition recounts the constant intellectual re-elaboration and artistic legacy of Picasso’s vision through a large project, specifically designed to be hosted in the heart of the Museum, which recounts the cultures of the world and their mutual and constant influence. It is in fact important to make the public aware of how Picasso grasped the essence and meaning of other artistic sources and assimilated them in his production throughout his life, from 1906 – the fundamental year for his production – up to the last works of sixties.

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With the return to “primitivism”, around 1925, the artist draws the tools of the plastic language from African examples, but also from Neolithic and proto-Iberian examples (of pre-Roman Spain), takes inspiration from Oceanic art, from ancient art Egyptian and that of classical Greece (black-figure vases). Picasso invents transpositions, remodels figures with disproportionate volumes, in a constant metamorphosis of the figures which often have a strong erotic connotation, and which will govern the evolution of his painting and his sculpture, especially in moments of personal or social crisis.