We are pleased to introduce the Museum’s 2008-2009 Artist in Residence - Carlos Luna.  Luna’s work is bold and heraldic with a distinctly Latino vernacular.  A gifted storyteller, his art channels his life and times from Cuba to Mexico to the United States.  Part of that personal history has to do with the artist’s admiration for Pablo Picasso, which led to a conversation about the Spanish master’s ceramics in the Museum’s collection.

Bernie Bercuson, a Miami Beach hotelier, very generously donated a collection of 66 editioned ceramics by Picasso in 1991.  Brilliantly conceived and impeccably fabricated, these multiples of plates, platters, and plaques are decorated in Picasso’s inimitable style with bullfights, dancers, and Don Quixote; while pitchers, tankards, and vases are equally deftly transformed into owls and beautiful women. Just as Picasso first learned from, then transformed the art of the past, contemporary artists continue to engage with the art of Picasso (directly or indirectly) as exhibitions, catalogues, and articles over recent years attest.

For his Artist in Residence exhibition, Luna chose to create this installation that combines his recent paintings with a personally selected group of fifty Picasso ceramics from the Museum’s collection and which underscore the graphic and decorative quality in his own work.  There are subjects – owls, roosters, and male and female protagonists – that one finds in both artists’ work.  But Picasso / Luna is less an exercise in finding sources of influence, than simply creating an exciting new channel of communication between the works of two artists. More...
 
Pablo PICASSO Ceramics | Carlos LUNA Paintings is on view through February 23, 2009.