HE MUSEO PICASSO MÁLAGA IS EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN IMAGES, THE PASSING OF TIME AND THE MODERN SUBJECT IN THE EXHIBITION PICASSO MEMORY AND DESIRE
Next November 14th, the Museo Picasso Málaga will be presenting PicassoMemory and Desire, an exhibition that explores the complex relationship between images and the evolution of the modern subject in the work of Picasso and his contemporaries.
The exhibition will bring together key figures of 20th-century art such as Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and René Magritte, while also including Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca's interpretation of Picasso's work.
Curated by Eugenio Carmona, professor of art history at the University of Malaga, and sponsored by the Fundación Unicaja, the exhibition will present a fascinating and revealing dialogue between memory and desire, historical time and modernity, and the way in which subjectivity transforms the symbols of culture.
The exhibition is based on the inspiring and complex painting Study with Plaster Head (1925) which so impressed Dalí and Lorca; a work that has been considered to represent a "dividing line" in Picasso's output and in the evolution of his artistic personality due to the manner in which it reflects on the passing of time and history.
PicassoMemory and Desire aims to reflect on the system of images and its relationship with the evolution of the modern subject in the work of Picasso and his contemporaries. The exhibition’s concept is based on a work by the artist, Study with Plaster Head of 1925. In synergy with the Surrealist atmosphere of the time, Picasso’s painting reveals that an era is not a fixed mental universe but a complex articulation of times, cultural references and life experiences.
Through his plaster figures Picasso alludes to the Fine Arts system and evokes "the father figure." But the plaster bust at the centre of the painting splits into several profiles, revealing its disturbing shadow. Picasso transformed this multifaceted image into both a psychic emblem of the divided subject and a metaphor for the past that engages in a dialogue with the present. Heterogeneity articulates the experience of the everyday, and for Picasso this is the place of memory. But memory is only brought into the present by desire; desire understood not only as a drive but as an inextinguishable will to live and transform. Picasso thus transformed the plaster bust into an emblem, tracing it through sensuality, creative achievement, the aesthetic of the telluric and the threat of the monster, and finally identifying it with the vernacular symbols of Spanish culture. Curated by Eugenio Carmona, this exhibition will be held at the Museo Picasso Málaga from 14 November 2025 to 12 April 2026.
