Picasso Museum Malaga exhibitions for 2025: from the artist in World War II to his disciple Farah Atassi

The Picasso Museum Málaga (MPM) has announced its four exhibitions for 2025, featuring titles and artists. Naturally, the gallery’s namesake, Picasso, will headline two of the scheduled exhibits which will explore both the Picasso who experienced World War II and the painter influenced by memory and desire. Both were approved this Thursday by the board of the exhibition center, which also plans for next year two other installations that will present the work of Picasso's contemporary, the surrealist from the Canary Islands, Óscar Domínguez, while the most fiercely contemporary exhibition will feature Belgian artist Farah Atassi. This calendar marks the first annual artistic design signed by the new director, Miguel López-Remiro, who took office last January and has already altered this year's program to include the current exhibition by American photographer Joel Meyerowitz.

The first exhibition of 2025 will open at the end of January with the inauguration of 'Picasso: The Royan Notebooks', which retrieves the sketchbooks the artist made in the coastal town of Royan, where he took refuge with Dora Maar for nearly a year after World War II was declared. In a time of material scarcity and with the anti-war echo of the monumental 'Guernica', the artist from Málaga purchased several sketch and note pads from the Hachette bookstore, which are the focus of this exhibition curated by Marilyn McCully and Michael Raeburn. These notebooks, used to sketch and visualize ideas referencing both previous works and new ideas for future pieces, will be displayed alongside drawings, gouaches, paintings, photographs, and poems from this prolific period of Picasso’s life.

Meanwhile, the current work of Farah Atassi (Brussels, 1981) will return to the Picasso Museum Málaga from May, this time with a solo spotlight. Thus, the personal work of the Belgian artist, which was already part of the collective celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the MPM 'The Echo of Picasso' last year, will fill the temporary rooms of the museum with 'Genius Loci', where she will deeply exhibit a production marked by geometric shapes and the play with space, which also does not hide the Cubist influence of Picasso himself and other masters like Fernand Léger and Philip Guston. This setup arrives with the endorsement of being one of the emerging artists in international art and the support of the Almine Rech gallery, a patron of the Málaga museum alongside Bernard Ruiz Picasso.

In the summer, Atassi’s exhibition will coincide with that of Óscar Domínguez (Tenerife, 1906; Paris, 1957), one of the key figures of Spanish surrealism alongside Miró and Dalí. Domínguez joined the movement late, in 1934. Inventor of 'decalcomania', "his painting seeks to give meaning to the exercise of creative freedom, understanding art and life as a single impulse in which chance, desire, black humor, and the irrational go hand in hand," previews the curator of the show, Isidro Hernández Gutiérrez. A personal friend of Picasso, Domínguez strengthened his friendship with the artist from Málaga during World War II, a period that is precisely the narrative thread of the first exhibition of the next year at the MPM.

The 2025 calendar will close again with Pablo Picasso himself, who, coinciding with the anniversary of his birth, will headline in October the inauguration of 'Memory and Desire', focused on the period between 1925 and 1945. Designed by Eugenio Carmona, the exhibition centers on the oil painting 'Atelier with Head and Plaster Arm' (1925), a work from the MoMA collection in New York in which the artist refers, with his plaster figures, to the Fine Arts that disappear evoking the figure of his father, also a painter, José Blasco.

It is noteworthy that the 2025 program ultimately does not include the previously announced exhibition of Marius de Zayas, which had been agreed upon by the former artistic director, José Lebrero, and was supposed to have opened this year. However, following López-Ramiro's appointment, the MPM announced that the exhibition of the Mexican draughtsman, caricaturist, painter, and art dealer of Andalusian origin scheduled for October 2024 was delayed to the following year and replaced by that of photographer Joel Meyerowitz, which is currently on display at the museum. The descendants of the Latin American artist expressed their displeasure with this decision and warned that the collection would not be available next year as it was committed to another European museum. Ultimately, De Zayas, who introduced Picasso in New York, will also not be featured at the MPM in 2025.