Image: detail of Picasso's Studio Villa La Galloise at Vallauris, 1954, by Lee Miller © The National Galleries of Scotland © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2018

*This exhibition is now closed*

Pablo Picasso is renowned for his insatiable curiosity and tireless urge for creativity which often led him to mediums beyond painting. Spanning almost seven decades of the artist’s life, the exhibition celebrated Picasso's experimentation with drawing, printmaking and ceramics, celebrating the mischievous genius who loved to break through conventional boundaries of medium and genre.

Throughout Picasso's life, the prolific artist created a vast array of hand drawings. From a pastel drawing he created as a teenager, to a major preparatory study made in 1937 for the painting Guernica, to a dextrous ink drawing made in 1971 at the age of 89, this exhibition showcased the extraordinary range of his achievements.

Works on paper also extended to examples of Picasso's experimental printmaking. He was imaginative towards traditional techniques and able to coax new and inventive methods. For Picasso, printmaking was not simply a way of reproducing images, it was a creative process in its own right. He often developed ideas through the process of printmaking, before introducing them into his painting. Examples in the exhibition dated from his first etchings made in 1905-6, known as the 'Saltimbanques Suite' to the '156 Series' of aquatints made between 1970 and 1972.

During the 1940s, Picasso spent many summers on the Cote d’Azur in the south of France, and in 1946 he visited the annual pottery exhibition in the nearby village of Vallauris. Impressed by the quality of the Madoura ceramic, Picasso was welcomed into their workshop and offered open access to the tools and resources needed to express his creativity. Thus began a collaboration which lasted almost 25 years. During this time Picasso produced more than 4,000 different plates, bowls, vases, pitchers and other forms. In all, he designed 633 different ceramic limited editions.

From the late 1950s, visitors to Vallauris were able to visit the Madoura ceramic studio and purchase original Picasso ceramics. A large number of these have been subsequently bequeathed to the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester. These works now represent the largest single public collection of Picasso ceramics in the UK.

The Lightbox has collaborated with the New Walk Museum to borrow a substantial number of ceramic pieces that were featured in this exhibition, as well as loans from the Victoria & Albert Museum and private collections. Collectively, they provided examples of Picasso’s work, proving his boundary-pushing creativity.

17 March 2018 – 24 June 2018