Picalso – Sophie Calle

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso, the Parisian museum dedicated to the painter invited Sophie Calle to take over the Hôtel Salé. Confronted with the figure of one of the masters of modern art, she chose to completely empty the spaces of the museum – Picasso was expelled! – in order to install her furniture and personal objects there, on the upper floors, and to unfurl, on the ground floor, a fresco imagined as an echo of the famous Guernicabut composed like an immense collage of the works she has been exchanging for years with other artists. To accompany this exhibition, Sophie Calle has imagined a work in which she lists her “rendezvous” with Picasso. Testimonies from guards, paintings packed during lockdown, etc. : so many stories presented in this art of storytelling so particular to Sophie Calle.

Designed like an artist’s book with its intimate format and its alternations of Bible and creative papers, Picalso immerses the reader in the funny, poetic and singular universe of the artist.

An essay by Yve-Alain Bois, entitled Picassiette, recontextualizes these “rendezvous” in the work of Sophie Calle and revisits her favorite themes of memory, lack, disappearance or even absence.