Picasso The Mediterranean:Enjoying the Mythical World

Exhibition period: Tuesday, October 26, 2021 – Sunday, September 25, 2022

Operating hours: 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (last admission 30 minutes prior to closing time)

Closed: Mondays (or if a holiday falls on a Monday, the following Tuesday), year-end and New Year’s holiday period（27.12.2021-3.1.2022）, and exhibition-installation periods

Outline of the exhibition

The great 20th-century artist Pablo Picasso established for himself a spiritual foundation rooted in the mythology of the Mediterranean region, which is nurtured by an ancient civilization and blessed with abundant light. Picasso was born and brought up in Málaga, a port city in Spain at the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula. Later, after achieving success as a painter in Paris, during the World War II period, he visited the southern French town of Vallauris along with Françoise Gilot, his romantic partner at that time.

In this town, which still preserved a history of pottery production dating back to ancient Roman times, Picasso discovered, through the making of ceramics, a new mode of expression in which he would immerse himself. Exploiting the plasticity of clay to make molds and then painting on the forms he created, throughout his career, Picasso explored the notion of new ways of bringing together solid mass and surface. As for the motifs that are visible in his ceramic works, they were adapted from numerous sources, including inhabitants of the Mediterranean coastal region to whom the spirit of the world of ancient myths had been handed down, and from nature’s animals and sea creatures. Along with Picasso’s actual works, we can examine and understand these aspects of the Mediterranean world that became some of his creative sources.

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