We should do something together. I’ll cut out little figures and you’ll take photos. You’ll give weight to the shadows using the sun. You’ll have to take thousands of shots.
—Pablo Picasso
For the inauguration of the newly expanded Geneva gallery, Gagosian is pleased to announce Villers | Picasso, an exhibition that traces the artistic collaboration between André Villers and Pablo Picasso and presents Villers’s latest work.
Bringing together photographic works, sculptures in paper and cut-out metal, and paintings, the exhibition presents a fresh perspective on the fertile dialogue and friendship between the two artists. It explores a unique occurrence in Picasso’s oeuvre: Villers was the only photographer whom Picasso fully integrated into his creative process, although he worked with many others, including Man Ray, Dora Maar, Brassaï, and David Douglas Duncan. This is also the gallery’s first in-depth presentation of Villers’s work.
Picasso met Villers in March 1953, while working at a ceramics studio in Vallauris, France. Diagnosed with bone tuberculosis, Villers had been residing at the village sanatorium since 1947. He was passionate about photography and devoted his first series to images of the premises and residents. The two men immediately bonded. Picasso took instant interest in Villers’s photographs and proposed that they explore working together. Ever since his Cubist period, photography had become Picasso’s favorite “laboratory” for his sculpture, as both mediums allowed for exploration of solids and voids, form and space, and light and shadow. Over ten years, Picasso and Villers conducted photographic experiments that sought to transcend the boundaries between photography and sculpture. Picasso traced, cut, pinned, and accented, creating paper “negatives” which Villers then photographed, printed, and otherwise transformed to make multiple prints, photograms, interpretations, stagings, and transfers. Hundreds of images resulted. The publication of the book Diurnes in 1962, with a preface by poet Jacques Prévert, was the culmination of their exceptional decade of joint investigation: thirty plates were selected from among some seven hundred photograms of masks, animals, and group figure studies made between 1954 and 1961.
