Opening at Museo Picasso Málaga from 14 November 2025 to 12 April 2026, Picasso: Memory and Desire revolves around a single, pivotal painting: Studio with Plaster Head (1925). Considered a “dividing line” in Picasso’s career, the work fascinated contemporaries like Dalí and Lorca, and embodies a dialogue between memory and desire, past and present, classical order and Surrealist imagination.

Curated by Eugenio Carmona and sponsored by Fundación Unicaja, the exhibition treats Picasso’s plaster bust not as a relic but as a living emblem its fractured profiles and shadowy gaze reflecting the psychic tensions of modern life. The painting becomes both a personal and historical lens.

The 1920s and 30s were paradoxical decades. European society wrestled with colonial legacies, rising authoritarianism, and yet a liberating cultural shift. Modern Art mirrored this tension: permanence versus change, memory versus aspiration. Picasso’s work, particularly the plaster bust motif, crystallized these contradictions, influencing an entire generation of artists.

Dalí, Lorca, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, and René Magritte all engaged with Picasso’s representations, exploring split faces, shadows, and classical busts as symbols of desire, identity, and cultural memory. Meanwhile, photographers like Brassaï, Dora Maar, and André Kertész translated these motifs into street scenes and domestic settings, merging everyday life with artistic reflection. Eileen Agar, Claude Cahun, and other Surrealists further expanded these ideas into explorations of gender, identity, and the gaze.

The exhibition also connects Picasso’s Studio with Plaster Head to his graphic series for Balzac’s Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu, highlighting the interplay of word and image, and reinforcing the idea of Picasso’s painting as a “hidden masterpiece”: rarely exhibited, yet crucial to understanding his shift from Classicism to Surrealism.

Picasso: Memory and Desire is both a research project and an exhibition: a testament to how a single painting can ripple across decades of artistic imagination, reshaping our sense of memory.