Curatorial notes
Pablo Picasso made this painting, Woman and pears (Fernande), with oil on canvas. You can see how he's working through a process, breaking down forms, and reassembling them, searching for something new. Look at the earthy palette, the browns, greens, and oranges. There's a real materiality to the paint, thick in places, almost like he's sculpting with it. See how the face is constructed from these angular planes, these geometric shapes. He’s using the structure to push the boundaries of representation. The way he renders the pears feels so intuitive, they're not just objects, they're part of this dynamic interplay between figure and ground, challenging our assumptions of seeing. It's like he's trying to capture not just what things look like, but how we experience them, how we perceive them. It reminds me a little of Cézanne, his interest in structure and form. It leaves us questioning what is real, and what is imagined.
