Living Things. Picasso Figure / Still-Life

This show assembles sketches, studies, prints and paintings that reveal some of the ways in which Picasso began to transform figures into objects and objects into figures, opening his work to metamorphosis from 1907 onwards.

Picasso first experimented with metamorphosis in 1907, when he began to transform the objects he depicted, converting figures into objects and vice versa, and creating new objects that were also figures.

The exhibition is a selection of paintings, prints, studies and sketches that show how the trend materialised in Picasso's oeuvre during his Cubist period and then between 1924 and the early thirties, years in which he met and worked closely with the Surrealists.

The exhibition is called Living Objects because Picasso's transpositions between figures and objects enliven the inanimate. Heads are at once guitars, still lifes become automata and objects behave as if they were actors on the stage, or else are blown to smithereens like the defenceless victims.