Picasso and the New Brutalism

From Sheet Metal to Concrete: Picasso and the New Brutalism Lecture in English

Picasso had long dreamed of creating monumental sculptures. Finally, in the late 1950s and the 1960s, his collaboration with the Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar made it possible to enlarge his sheet-metal sculptures into concrete constructions as large as buildings. The unprecedented scale of these works introduced a Surrealist element absent from the original sculptures.

The erection of Picasso’s giant sculptures coincided with the rise of the Brutalist style of architecture, which also relied on poured concrete to make aggressive sculptural statements. Picasso’s sculptures, like the Brutalist buildings of Le Corbusier, Paul Rudolph, and Alison and Peter Smithson, transformed the urban fabric into a landscape of dreams and nightmares. In collaboration with the Universidad de Málaga.