https://www.lacasaencendida.es/en/exhibitions/picasso-untitled-14423

Presented by La Casa Encendida and curated by Eva Franch i Gilabert, the Picasso: Untitled exhibition 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 Ahmet Öğüt, Janaina Tschäpe, Frida Orupabo, Leonor Serrano Rivas, Taryn Simon, Tyra Tingleff, Cabello/Carceller, Erwin Wurm, Simon Denny, Lidia Ouhramane, Camille Henrot, Tuur van Valen & Revital Cohen, Romeo Mivekannin, Adrián Villar Rojas, Pauline Cournier, Klára Hosnedlová, Trevor Paglen, OMSK, Ian Cheng, Black Quantum Futurism, DIS, and others.

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.