beyond genius:
picasso's passion
and creation
2023.8.13-2023.11.13
artist: pablo picasso
curator：wang chunchen
Pablo Picasso (Málaga, Spain, 25 October 1881 - Mougins, France, 8 April 1973), is one of the great geniuses of 20th century art, with unlimited talent and a voracious need to create. His imagination feeds on everything around him. His inspiration finds its sources in ancient cultures, in distant civilizations, or in the environment that surrounds him. He takes the simplest forms of everyday life and turns them into art.
This Picasso' Passion and Creation exhibition brings the visitor closer to the ingenious universe created by the artist through his paintings, etchings, ceramics and photographs. Picasso was equally skillful at all of these techniques; he worked on new approaches to Art that led to innovative creative processes and pioneer forms of expression.As a painter, he started out from Academicism, he created Cubism, and passed through Classicism,Surrealism and Expressionism in what was a constant process of change and rupture, in his never-ending quest for freedom. The human figure, or more specifically portraits, and still lifes were Pablo Picasso’s main themes throughout his career.His drawings and etchings are one of the most important parts of his career, perhaps because it depicted the restless and risky, tenacious and passionate spirit that characterised him. For Picasso, engraving provided the means with which to depict his most profound desires, emotions and thoughts.
Everything imaginable and even everything he failed to acknowledge as imagined is reflected in his graphic works. The different personal and artistic obsessions that haunted him throughout his life find an escaperoute here and allow us to track him through each phase of his life and his creative art. Picasso’s graphic art comprises more than 2000 works. He frequently used a mixture of techniques, such as etching and drypoint, or etching and aquatint.
As a ceramist, Picasso established an open dialogue with his sculptures. Ceramics allowed him to exercise his drawing skills, his extraordinary dexterity as a painter, and his subtle talent at modelling shapes. Itsplastic flexibility, together with an avant-garde spirit and his capacity for innovation, carry it beyondtraditional consideration of pottery as a craft to attain the category of Art.
Picasso is undoubtedly the most revolutionary and tireless artist of the 20th century. With his creativeforce and his artistic potential, he challenged the norms of his day and broke new ground in the Historyof Art.
pablo picasso
Artist
Pablo Picasso(25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture,[8][9] the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.
wang chunchen
Curator
Professor, PhD supervisor, Doctor of Art History, art critic, and curator. Graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, currently working at the Art Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, engaging in research on modern art history and contemporary art theory and criticism.
In 2012, appointed as a special curator by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, where they curated an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art. Art in America magazine referred to them as "the first Chinese curator from mainland China to be appointed by an American art museum."