Economy: Picasso

The Museo Picasso (Barcelona, Spain) will run, from May 26 to September 2, the exhibition Economy: Picasso, which aims to retrace the line of force implicit in the work and the trade in Picasso’s art in the landscape of current artistic practices and find, in their most radical manifestations and their most original operations, ways with which to reformulate the current state of relations between art and the world — relations that are always economically mediated, whether by the distribution or the exchange of the things themselves.

In addition to works by Picasso, the exhibition will include works by artists from his circle (Marcel Duchamp, Max Jacob, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Mario de Zayas, Max Aub, Helios Gómez, Felipe Alaiz, Barradas, etc), works by major mid-20th-century artists (Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, Yves Klein, Jasper Johns, Asger Jorn, etc), and other works from the long present of the dematerialization of the arts (Marcel Broodthaers, Guy Debord, Mel Bochner, Jan Dibbets, Hanne Darboven, IsidoroValcárcel Medina, Hans Haacke, Adrian Piper, Nacho Criado, Sherrie Levine, Gavin Jantjes and Zachary Formwalt, among others).

The dematerialization of the arts is often put forward as having two distinct genealogies, albeit with numerous points of intersection: one configured by the operations of Duchamp and his followers, the other tracing its most salient moments and modes in the various Russian Productivisms. However, not only does the line initiated by the art of Pablo Picasso, together with its material consequences, constitute the ‘configuring element’ of the present economy of art, but the neglect into which its genealogical trail has fallen makes it all but impossible for us to engage realistically with the current landscape of the arts.

Dates: from May 25 to September 2.
Location: Museo Picasso. Montcada 15-23. 08003. Barcelona.
Hours: from Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 20pm.

See more artworks by Picasso here