the Sacred and the Profane

Picasso: the Sacred and the Profane, an exhibition curated by Paloma Alarcó and introduced in rooms 53 to 55 of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza’s first flooring, brings to an in depth the museum’s collection of initiatives in reference to the Picasso Celebration 1973/2023. The present’s steered 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 skill to combine components and points from earlier artwork and to replicate on the final word essence of portray. Intuiting that creative 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 present us basic clues relating to the uncertainties of the up to date world.

For Picasso, artwork was a way of exorcising each his personal fears and the challenges dealing with humanity. He thought of himself to be a type of shaman, endowed with a supernatural energy that gave him the power 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, by an issue wherein 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 reveals 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 distinctiveness and paradoxes of Picasso’s artwork, his private reinterpretation of the themes and genres of the Spanish and European creative custom and the way in which wherein each pagan and Christian myths and rites merge in lots of his creations, particularly when addressing the extra common problems with life, demise, intercourse, violence and ache. Iconophagy offers with the appropriation of sure elements of the previous by the contemplation of works in museums or the photographic reproductions that Picasso compulsively collected; Private Labyrinth focuses on the narration of his private obsessions by the remodeling of classical myths and epics; and Sacred and Profane Rites delves into his strategy to pagan rites and the legacy of the sacramental by completely different Christian allegories and cosmologies.