Gagosian

VILLERS | PICASSO
9 October – 19 December 2015

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 who 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. 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 the Cubist period, photography had become Picasso's favorite "laboratory" for his sculpture, given the shared interest in both mediums in solid/void, form/space, light/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" that 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.

The lessons of their collaboration fueled Picasso's paintings and complemented his sculptures, including the series in folded paper and cut-out sheet metal. The collaboration also grounded Villers's later explorations. Creating his own negatives from cutouts from magazines, newspapers and tracing paper, Villers "painted" them through solarization and developer washes; added effects using transparency, image-layers, and texts; and introduced scraps of cardboard, paper, and fabric into his prints, accenting them with pastel.

Recently, Villers has made ephemeral small-scale sculptures using paper, scissors, and, at times, fragments of images borrowed from the old masters, which he cuts out and restructures into collages, then stages and photographs digitally--the latest evolution of his mixed-media inventions with Picasso.

The fully illustrated publication that accompanies the exhibition will include the historic texts "Photobiography" by André Villers and "Diurnes" by Jacques Prévert, republished on this occasion.

André Villers was born in 1930 in Beaucourt, France, and lives and works in the South of France. Following the hardships of World War II, he contracted bone tuberculosis. In 1947, he was moved to the Vallauris sanatorium for treatment. There he took photography classes as early as 1952. Recent exhibitions include "André Villers, Photographies et découpages / Villers 80: Émulsions," Villa Aurélienne, Fréjus (2010); "La Perspective du Ventre. André Villers photographe et artiste—photographer and artist, ritratti da Picasso a Fellini, fotoelaborazioni e decoupages," Fondaco dell'Arte di Venezia (2010); "André Villers et la photographie: Noces de diamant! soixante ans de photographie," Musée de la Photographie André Villers, Mougins; Centre d'art La Malmaison, Cannes; and Galerie Sapone, Nice (2012–13); and "André Villers," Musée national Picasso, Paris (2014). Most of Villers' oeuvre is housed at the Musée de la photographie Nicéphore-Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saône, as well as at the Musée de la photographie, Charleroi, Belgium.

Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain in 1881 and died in Mougins, France in 1973. Recent exhibitions include "Picasso: Tradition and the Avant-Garde," Museo Nacional del Prado and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2006); "Picasso and American Art," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2006, traveled to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, through 2007); "Picasso et les Maîtres," Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris (2008–09); "Picasso: Challenging the Past," National Gallery, London (2009); "Picasso at the Metropolitan Museum," Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2010); and "Picasso: Black and White," Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2012–13). "Picasso Sculpture" is currently on view at Museum of Modern Art, New York through February 7, 2016.