Of birds, beasts and muses

Birds and beasts of all stripes figure in a new selling exhibition brought to Hong Kong by PhillipsX. Created by Picasso over his long and illustrious career, the pieces on show cover a time span from 1906 to 1974 - the date of a gold medallion with owl face designed by Picasso and executed a year after his death.

The exhibits also reflect a highly diverse range in terms of the choice of material and scale. Bulky ceramic objects of everyday use sit next to a palm-fit bronze sculpture of a bull. Limited-edition etchings on roughly A4-size paper rub shoulders with large oil-on-canvas paintings from Picasso's Rose Period, dominated by warm earth tones. Ceramic plates and vases, a terracotta medallion and even a cigarette lighter bearing the marks of the genius are included in the show.

The heterogeneity is also in evidence in the moods of the animals depicted. For instance, there is an etching showing an angry rooster, bristling its excessive growth of plumes, next to a set of frolicking frogs with mischief in their eyes. And the ink-on-paper monkey reaching out to a human couple (Femme et singe, 1954) is a far cry from the monkey face on a ceramic plate (1960), meeting the viewer's eye with a hard stare.

"The animals and birds he painted seem to have real inner lives," says Jeremiah Evarts, deputy chairman and senior international specialist, Modern and Contemporary Art, PhillipsX. "I think there is absolute darkness in some of the animals and joy in others, a feature that runs throughout Picasso's career and not only when he is painting animals."

Picasso conflates his love for animals and for a woman who served as his muse in Canard pique-fleurs (1951).The image on the glazed surface of the duck-shaped ceramic flower holder is of painter and ceramicist Françoise Gilot (1921-2023), cupping her face between her hands. The bewildered look on the painted face, accentuated by the dilating eyeballs, reminds us of the complicated history shared between two artists who were also a couple trying to balance art and life in a patriarchal society.