FRANCIS PICABIA

Picabia famously wrote, “In order to have clean ideas, change them as often as your shirt.” Throughout his career, Picabia shifted rapidly between styles. Founding and then rejecting almost every major artistic movement of the early 20th century, paintings of women remained at the core of Picabia’s practice. Due to the long historic, academic tradition of painting the female body, women were the perfect subject matter for Picabia’s endless efforts to upend, subvert, and reinterpret modern painting.

Francis Picabia: Femmes __includes masterpieces from Picabia’s many experimentations in painting, including his frenzied “Monster” series, revolutionary “Transparencies”, and proto-Pop portraits of pin-up models and actresses. Picabia’s work defies our conventional understanding of modern art. Extremely influential to succeeding generations of artists, Picabia’s oeuvre, on view in this exhibition of paintings of women, provides an alternative, more open, narrative of 20th century art.

Francis Picabia: Femmes opens to the public on Thursday 5 September and will remain on view through Saturday 9 November. A catalogue with text by Dave Hickey and an “Interview with Colline” published in Journal des Arts in 1945 will accompany the exhibition.