the Sacred and the Profane

Picasso: the Sacred and the Profane, an exhibition curated by Paloma Alarcó and offered in rooms 53 to 55 of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza’s first ground, brings to an in depth the museum’s sequence of initiatives in reference to the Picasso Celebration 1973/2023. The present’s prompt discourse goals at exploring the boldness and originality with which the artist approached each the classical world and the themes of the Judeo-Christian custom, revealing his potential to combine parts and points from earlier artwork and to mirror on the final word essence of portray. Intuiting that inventive expression had taken on sacred dimensions from the start of time, Picasso mixed the divine and the human within the broadest and deepest sense in his work. When wanting on the artwork of the previous, he reveals new methods of deciphering historical past, and in his clear-sightedness continues to offer us basic clues concerning the uncertainties of the up to date world.

For Picasso, artwork was a way of exorcising each his personal fears and the challenges going through humanity. He thought of himself to be a form of shaman, endowed with a supernatural energy that gave him the flexibility to metamorphose the seen world. In that perception, and surrounded by an entire world of magical references, Picasso performed the position of intercessor between peoples and civilisations, between artwork and the spectator, via a topic during which the sacred is barely distinguished from the profane.

The exhibition brings collectively a complete of 38 works, 22 of them by Picasso. Along with the eight displays from the Thyssen collections, there are a number of loans from the Musée nationwide Picasso-Paris and different collectors and establishments, in addition to work by El Greco, Rubens, Zurbarán, Van der Hamen, Delacroix, a sculpture by Pedro de Mena and a few engravings by Goya. Spanning three a long time of the artist’s manufacturing and centred on three thematic plots, the present establishes a dialogue that highlights the individuality and paradoxes of Picasso’s artwork, his private reinterpretation of the themes and genres of the Spanish and European inventive custom and the way in which during which each pagan and Christian myths and rites merge in a lot of his creations, particularly when addressing the extra common problems with life, loss of life, intercourse, violence and ache. Iconophagy offers with the appropriation of sure points of the previous via the contemplation of works in museums or the photographic reproductions that Picasso compulsively collected; Private Labyrinth focuses on the narration of his private obsessions via the transforming of classical myths and epics; and Sacred and Profane Rites delves into his method to pagan rites and the legacy of the sacramental via completely different Christian allegories and cosmologies.