Picalso

To mark the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, the Paris 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 empty the entire museum space – Picasso was evicted! – to install her furniture and personal objects on the upper floors, and on the first floor, to unfurl a fresco imagined as an echo of the famous Guernica, but composed as an immense collage of works that she has been exchanging with other artists over the years. To accompany this exhibition, À toi de faire, ma mignonne, Sophie Calle has created a book in which she lists her “rendez-vous” with Picasso. Testimonies from the guards, paintings packed up during confinement, etc.: these are just some of the stories told in this book. all in the art of storytelling so characteristic of Sophie Calle.

Conceived as an artist’s book, with its intimate format and alternating Bible and creative papers, Picalso immerses the reader in the funny, poetic and singular world of the artist. An essay by Yve-Alain Bois, entitled Picassiette, recontextualizes these “rendez-vous” in Sophie Calle’s work and revisits her favorite themes of memory, lack, disappearance and absence.