BARCELONA.- Museu Picasso presents today Living Things: Picasso Figure - Still Life, on view through March 1, 2009. From 1907, Picasso opened his work to metamorphosis. He increasingly made one thing into another. In particular, he turned figures into things and things into figures, or even created things that were also figures.
This exhibition brings together sketches, studies, prints and paintings to show some of the ways in which this happened in Picasso’s work through the Cubist period and then between 1924 and the early 1930s as he engaged with and responded to the Surrealists.
It is called ‘Living Things’ because Picasso’s exchanges between figures and objects animate the inanimate. Heads are also guitars, still-lives become automata, and finally, in the later rooms, objects perform like actors on stage or are pulled apart as if the defenseless victims of attack. The exhibition presents 68 artworks, most of them by Picasso: 49 paintings, among them 2 oils by Juan Gris, 9 drawings, 8 photographs by Waléry, and 1 print.
