Picasso/Minotaur and the seven women of the Labyrinth

Exhibition on from 30 June to 7 October at Palais Lumière EVIAN

Isabelle de Borchgrave has now created a entire installation in paper to portray the life and work of Pablo Picasso at different periods, haunted and inhabited by the seven women in his life. Here the Myth of the Labyrinth and its echoes unfold for us like a theatre of shadows.

But how can one possibly interpret, indeed reinterpret the life between these women (covering seven passionate and intense moments in a life) who, for over half a century, lived alongside and influenced Picasso’s oeuvre? How to describe the relationships between the mythological references, in particular around the Minotaur and the Minotauramachie, the bullfight and the Minotaur….? Isabelle de Borchgrave has imagined a Picasso, in his striped sailor shirt, bull-masked (elements drawn from an historic photograph where he himself dramatises the scene, on a beach), surrounded by his seven women - and indeed we know that Minos demanded in sacrifice to Aegeus, king Athens, seven youths and seven young girls for the Minotaur.

 By Patrick Amine