Launching the 2025 programme at the start of the year, Picasso: the Royan sketchbooks will analyse the sketchbooks produced by the artist in the French town of Royan, where he lived for a year following the outbreak of World War II. This will be followed next summer by the work of Oscar Domínguez, the Surrealist artist from Tenerife, which will occupy the museum’s temporary exhibition galleries in parallel to an exhibition on the Belgian artist Farah Atassi entitled Genius Loci. Finally, next autumn the museum will be presenting Picasso. Memory and desire, focusing on the artist’s output between 1925 and 1945.

In another new feature for the Museo Picasso’s exhibition programme for 2025, prominent international artists will be invited to transform a space in the Buenavista Palace. The ‘Places’ project will benefit from the participation of renowned creators, such as the Trisha Brown Company, known for its innovative approach to contemporary dance. This initiative will be aiming not only to enrich the city’s cultural panorama but also to promote dialogue between different artistic disciplines and the historic heritage.

PICASSO: THE ROYAN SKETCHBOOKS

Jan 31 – Apr 30, 2025
Between September 1939 and August 1940 Picasso produced eight sketchbooks of pencil and ink drawings while he lived in the French town of Royan, where he moved with Dora Maar and accompanied by Jaime Sabartés following the outbreak of World War II. Marie-Thérèse Walter and Maya, her daughter with Picasso, had already settled in the town. In the following year the artist made the 500-kilometre journey between Royan and Paris several times in order to check that as a foreigner his documents were in order and also to inspect the storage of his works and attend an exhibition of his drawings.

Possibly due to the difficulty of finding art materials in Royan, Picasso bought several sketchbooks and ordinary paper notebooks, both lined and graph paper, at the Hachette bookshop. These sketchbooks are now the focus of this exhibition, curated by Marilyn McCully and Michael Raeburn. Throughout his career Picasso habitually used sketchbooks to jot down visual ideas, some referring to previous works and others to new ideas for future compositions.

Picasso: the Royan sketchbooks, organised in close collaboration with the Almine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Foundation, will contextualise the sketchbooks by presenting them alongside other works created by the artist in Royan, as well as documentation relating to that period. Drawings, gouaches, paintings, photographs and poems by Picasso will together reveal a prolific stage in his life and artistic career.

FARAH ATASSI, GENIUS LOCI

May 23 – Dec 14, 2025

Farah Atassi (1981). Seated Woman and Daisies, 2024. Oil and glycerol on canvas. 180 × 145 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech © Photo: Nicolas Brasseur © Farah Atassi, VEGAP, Málaga, 2024

Farah Atassi, one of the most promising figures in the field of contemporary art, has created a body of work that is markedly influenced by geometrical forms and spatial interplay. Atassi, whose work establishes dialogues with great masters of modern art such as Pablo Picasso, will be presenting an artistic proposal that is not simply a reinterpretation of the Cubist tradition but rather an exploration of the expressive possibilities of space in contemporary painting.

Born in Brussels in 1981, Farah Atassi studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris and has been acclaimed for her unique style, which combines the tradition of figurative painting with a clear Cubist influence and a very personal approach to the representation of space. In the exhibition Genius Loci she explores a series of works created between 2015 and 2025 in which she continues to challenge the conventions of pictorial space.

Atassi’s painting, which frequently seems to be constructed in the manner of a building, does not aim at a faithful reproduction of reality. The precise lines and objects represented in her paintings seem to belong to a parallel world where time stands still, evoking a feeling of mystery. The exhibition’s title, Genius Loci, suggests a connection with the concept of the ‘spirit of the place’, where the spaces created by the artist take on a life of their own, charged with a subtle energy that transcends the geometric forms. The exhibition is curated by art historian Marjolaine Lévy.

ÓSCAR DOMÍNGUEZ

Jun 13 – Oct 13, 2025

Óscar Domínguez (1906-1957). Le dimanche ou Rut marin, 1935. Oil on Canvas. 93 × 73 × 3 cm. Colección Óscar Domínguez. TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes. © Óscar Domínguez, VEGAP, Málaga, 2024

Together with Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Remedos Varo and Esteban Francés, the painter Óscar Domínguez (Tenerife, Canary Islands, 1906 - Paris, 1957) is among the constellation of names that Spanish painting contributed to the international Surrealist movement. Domínguez’s work was inspired by an iconography connected with his youth in the north of Tenerife, where he forged an irrational and superabundant concept of the enigmatic processes of metamorphosis that would accompany his work throughout his career.

After he moved to Paris in 1927 to take charge of the family businesses Domínguez joined the Surrealist group in 1934. From that point on he participated in the publications, exhibitions and collective activities organised by this Parisian group, including the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1938. During the Occupation, Domínguez was involved in clandestine activities in support of the Resistance. It was then that his friendship deepened with Picasso, whom he called ‘the most sensational man of the time’ and who exercised a notable influence on his work.

A visionary painter and a remarkable creator of symbolically functioning objects, Óscar Domínguez was responsible for the invention of ‘decalcomania’. His works of the 1930s are among the highest expressions of the imagination’s drive for playfulness. In the words of the exhibition’s curator Isidro Hernández Gutiérrez, Domínguez’s painting seeks to give meaning to the exercise of creative freedom, understanding art and life as a single impulse in which chance, desire, black humour and the irrational go hand in hand.

PICASSO. MEMORY AND DESIRE

Nov 14, 2025 – Apr 12, 2026

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Studio with Plaster Head. Juan-les-Pins, summer 1925. Oil on canvas. 97.9 × 131.1 cm. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Inv. 116.1964. © Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Picasso. Memory and desire reflects on the image system and its relationship with the evolution of the modern subject in the work of Picasso and his contemporaries. The exhibition’s starting point is a painting by the artist of 1925, Studio with Plaster Head. In synergy with the Surrealist atmosphere, the work reveals how an era is not a fixed mental universe but rather a sum of factors, including the anachronistic. Through his plaster objects Picasso alludes to the vanishing Fine Arts system, evoking the father figure. For him, this is the place of ‘memory’.

However, the plaster bust that is the painting’s principal motif splits into various different profiles and casts a disturbing and illogical shadow. Picasso turned it into both the psychic emblem of the divided subject and the metaphor of the ‘intrusive past’ which survives in a threatening present that is incessantly transformed. The ‘heterochronic’ articulates the real experience of everyday life. This Picassoesque metaphor was anticipated, albeit with a different meaning, by Giorgio de Chirico. Re-signified by Picasso, the icon was also used by Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, René Magritte, Dora Maar, Brassaï, Jean Cocteau, Jean Metzinger, Alberto Giacometti and Roland Penrose, and was even ‘interpreted’ by Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca, without forgetting Gregorio Prieto and José Moreno Villa’s contaminations of the subject. With them, the plaster bust is a shared ‘period’ signifier that acquires a specific meaning. In addition, Picasso expanded and metamorphosed what he created in Studio with Plaster Head for more than a decade, working in a range of registers from the telluric to the erotic. These continuous shifts of meaning are the place of ‘desire’; desire understood as an intense will to live.

Eugenio Carmona is the curator of this exhibition, which will be on display between November 1925 and April 1926.