On October 27, 2023, the Museo Picasso Málaga (MPM) celebrates its 20th anniversary. Now a fully mature institution, the MPM has confirmed its role in the transformation of institutional culture in Malaga and Andalusia. With more than 8 million visitors and a constantly changing programme, the MPM has also become a key reference and major stimulus for cultural tourism and the creation of previously nonexistent socio-economic networks in the museum’s immediate surroundings and beyond.

Thanks to the generosity and close involvement of Christine, Bernard and Almine Ruiz-Picasso, the management of the Junta de Andalucía, and the contributions of the museum’s patrons, directors, and staff, the MPM has brought about a qualitative shift in museology in Andalusia. Over the past 20 years, it has launched innovative museographical proposals, regularly renewed its permanent collection, and organized exhibitions that have had a notable influence on contemporary cultural debate, as well as events and projects of a type never previously organised in the region. Furthermore, the MPM has devised an innovative and influential educational and mediation programme that has attracted and interacted with numerous sectors of the public while also forging links with the university world and with researchers through its seminars and encounters on an international level.

During this process of development and evolution as an institution, the MPM has been able to take on some of the characteristics of a “cultural center,”, not just through its organisation of activities but also due to its emphasis on social inclusion and focus on diversity.

In addition to its ongoing mission to improve and develop all of the above, future plans for the MPM include the integration of cultural activity into the digital society with the aim of creating joint activities with other museums and cultural institutions in Andalusia. Already launched with the Museo de Bellas Artes and the Museo del Hospital de los Venerables in Seville, this initiative has been extremely well received across all sectors of society.

CELEBRATION IN MALAGA
The Museo Picasso Málaga’s 20th anniversary in fact coincides with the events organised by “Picasso Celebration 1973-2023”, an exceptionally significant international event that marks the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death. The Celebration comprises around 50 exhibitions and events organised by cultural institutions of the European Union (16 exhibitions in Spain, 12 in France, 2 in Germany, 1 in Belgium, and 1 in Romania), 2 in Switzerland, 1 in Monaco, and 7 in the USA.

The MPM is taking an active part in the international “Picasso Celebration 1973-2023” programme with two interesting exhibitions. Firstly, *Picasso Sculptor. Matter and Body *curated by Carmen Giménez, will be on display from May 9 to 10 September 10, 2023; and secondly, The Echo of Picasso, curated by Eric Troncy, will be held between October 3, 2023, and March 24, 2024.

In parallel, the MPM’s permanent display will be renewed with two “Dialogue” proposals curated by Michael FitzGerald and the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (FABA).

The “Picasso Celebration 1973-2023” programme is headed by the Spanish National Committee for the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and by the Musée National Picasso-Paris, with the coordination of the binational committee comprising cultural and diplomatic departments from France and Spain. It is supported by Telefónica, corporate sponsor of the event in Spain.

THE MUSEUM’S 2023 EXHIBITION PROGRAMME
Between May 9 and  September 10, 2023, the MPM is presenting the exhibition Picasso Sculptor. Matter and Body, which will subsequently be shown at the Museo Guggenheim in Bilbao. As an artistic resource and the ultimate aim of representation, the body is the focus of the first major exhibition on Picasso’s sculpture to be held in Spain. Devised by Carmen Giménez, the first director of the Museo Picasso Málaga, this selection of sculptures offers a survey of the range of styles that Picasso employed to expand the forms of the human body, expressed through a variety of formats and genres and in almost every possible material: wood, iron, plaster, cement, steel, bronze, and steel are all present in the artist’s sculptural output. For Picasso, sculpture was certainly not a secondary artistic discipline, and he rather conceived it as a form of expression comparable to painting, drawing, printmaking, and ceramics, given that, as he himself said, no art form is more important than another. These languages and materials allowed him to express different facets of his creativity. Although this aspect of his work became more evident and prolific during his Cubist phase, Picasso produced sculptures from almost the start of his lengthy career and continued to do so throughout his life.

Carmen Giménez is a Spanish museum and exhibitions curator. She has been an adviser to the Spanish Ministry of Culture and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She has organised a large number of international exhibitions.

In addition, from October 3, 2023, to March 24, 2024, the MPM will be showing the exhibition The Echo of Picasso. Pablo Picasso’s enormous influence on twentieth-century art endures into the twenty-first century, and he worked in a remarkably diverse range of styles. In addition to Cubism, his principal contribution to modern art was the liberty that characterised every aspect of his painting, sculpture, and graphic work. It is generally accepted that Picasso had a profound impact on modern art, allowing it to be said that no other artist before him had so many followers and admirers, as well as critics. Curated by Eric Troncy, The Echo of Picasso focuses on this influence of the artist’s practices on contemporary creation and in particular on the current globalized scene, bringing together work by around thirty artists in a dialogue with Picasso.

Eric Troncy is a French art critic and exhibition curator. He has organised more than 100 monographic exhibitions at the Le Consortium art center in Dijon, of which he is co-director, and at numerous other prestigious art institutions.

NEW DIALOGUES IN THE MUSEUM’S PERMANENT COLLECTION
In addition to these two major events, which will single out the year 2023, two exhibitions organised by the American art historian Michael FitzGerald and the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso will be created in the context of the museum’s permanent collection, giving rise to two new “Dialogues”. The first, devoted to sculpture, will relate to the exhibition Picasso: matter and body, while the second, focusing on late works by the artist, will connect with The Echo of Picasso.

A professor of art history at Trinity College, Hartford (Connecticut), Michael FitzGerald specialises in the field of 20th-century European and American art, particularly the work of Pablo Picasso. He has curated numerous exhibitions and will be responsible for the new presentation of the permanent collection of the Museo Picasso Málaga in 2024.

THE MUSEUM’S EDUCATIONAL, CULTURAL AND ACADEMIC PROGRAMME
Picasso’s work and times and the enigmas that the former continues to generate will be the guiding threads for the organisation of a programme of educational, academic, and cultural activities during this double celebration, engaging with questions such as: “What role can the artist’s work and approach play in the education of people born in the 21st century?” Furthermore, Picasso: matter and body will function as the starting point for an analysis of the power of the concept of the “human body” in the field of modern sculptural experimentation.

In conjunction with the first exhibition of 2023, the museum’s educational team is already working on a real presence and digital academic project that will introduce the creative potential generated by the emergence of the new sculpture in modern art created by artists such as Picasso, Brancusi, Pevsner and Duchamp. With regard to next year’s second exhibition, the programme Picasso in 21st-century Art will aim to reveal in a participatory manner the potential effects and repercussions of Picasso’s work evident in 21st century art at a time when ethics and aesthetics have become flexible axes that reveal unprecedented expressive geographies previously marginalised by art history and when cross-disciplinary approaches encourage us to see Picasso as a point of encounter and divergence between ways of thinking and creating art and its history.

NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONAL COLLABORATION With the support of prestigious cultural institutions in Europe and the United States, the international “Picasso Celebration 1973-2023” will be structured around approximately 50 exhibitions and events that together offer an art-historical analysis of Pablo Picasso’s work. With this aim in mind, the French and Spanish governments are jointly working on a programe of international scope through a bilateral committee that brings together the two countries’ governmental and diplomatic services.

The Musée National Picasso-Paris and the Spanish National Committee for the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso are delighted to support this exceptional programme, which benefits from the participation of Telefónica as a corporate sponsor of the Spanish programme.

Telefónica, a multi-national telecommunications company and world leader in the supply of technological, digital, and communication solutions and services, will be present at all the events organised to celebrate the work of the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso on the 50th anniversary of his death. Through this initiative, Telefónica’s aim is to participate in the dissemination of the work of this great Malaga-born artist, universally acknowledged as one of the most prolific painters of all time, helping to make his art more accessible to the widest possible public.