Pablo Picasso
Late Works. Paintings and drawings.
21.11.02 - 01.02.03
Pablo Picasso's late works are marked by the strength, freedom and vitality that come with age, experience and technical superiority. For this exhibition Galleri Faurschou has gathered together a number of works on paper and a few paintings that render an aggregate impression of the dynamics at play in Picasso's late and ever so vital works.
In Picasso's late period, the works he created after 1963-64, his characteristic cubist lines are replaced with a softer and freer rendition of (and submission to) the rounded forms of a woman's body. His figures are pared down to the almost archetypal: the painter and his model; the naked woman - reclining or sitting - but also the couple, the kiss, the pipe smoker, the flute player and the old fellows he portrays. In short, he is concentrating on what is most important: the woman, love and "the human comedy".
In themselves, these motifs do not represent anything new: Picasso had already come by that time to be the painter of women, par excellence. No other painter had committed himself to such exhaustive studies of the woman, either as phantasmagoria or in the complexity of reality: the woman as Alma Mater, as the classical goddess, the crying woman, the hysterical, the voluptuous, the slender, the fertile life-giving mother or the enticing courtesan.
What is decidedly new in Picasso's late work is the simplified manner in which he carries out his work. Here, two characteristic features manifest themselves simultaneously. On the one hand, there is the urge to simplify; his works come to be almost pictogram-like, with a fixed inventory of signs. On the other hand, there is a tendency toward an approach to painting that accentuates the very material all the more dramatically: the color is applied in a thick layer carrying the distinct traces of rapidly made and frequently rough brush strokes.
Undoubtedly, the most striking characteristic of Picasso's late period is the vitality - which is manifested most concretely in an enormous production of works. In his last decade, Picasso was painting with an intensity and speed as never before, as if in that way he was able to keep death at bay. As Picasso himself expressed it, "I have less and less time - and more and more to say".
It is as though the closer Picasso moved toward the inevitable end, the more borders he removed for himself. His paintings bear the impress of an artistic impetus that lives out the erotic in earnest. The vitality is positively pouring from his paintings, bursting with life and delight. Never before has he used such strong colors and never before has he mastered his technique with such superiority.
The exhibition will be open for the press Tuesday, November 19.
The opening is on Thursday, November 21, 5-7pm
Exhibition period: November 21. - January 25. 2003
The gallery is open: Tuesday - Friday 11am - 6pm, Saturday 11am - 2pm