Orlan "Weeping women are angry"

In order to question Picasso's posterity and echo the current debates around his work, the museum is launching a program of collaborations with contemporary artists. To start off these collaborations, the French artist ORLAN has been invited to exhibit two photographic series entitled "ORLAN hybridizes with Picasso’s portraits of women" and "Weeping women are angry", produced in 2019.

A total artist, expressing herself through different media (from performance to new technologies), ORLAN questions the status of the body and the political, religious, social and traditional pressures that are inscribed in it. Her work denounces the violence done to the body and in particular to women's bodies, thus engaging her work in a feminist struggle.

Here, she takes over a series of paintings and drawings by Picasso from the late 1930s. Representing grieving figures, allegories of suffering, they were largely inspired by the photographer Dora Maar, then a companion of the painter. These portraits are part of the research carried out by Picasso around the large composition Guernica (1937), which was intended to denounce the disasters of the Civil War in Spain and the atrocities committed by the fascist regimes. With these photographic montages, ORLAN relies on the visual strength of the artist's works to take a critical, even accusatory look at the relationship between the painter and his model.

""Weeping women are angry" is a new series of hybrid photographs that I created to showcase women in the shadows: the inspirers, the models, the muses.  (...) This new series of hybridizations from Picasso's paintings of Dora Maar in tears is a destruction, reconstruction and creation of the female figure that kaleidoscopies the world in which she is mixed. The portraits are blurred by their environment and anger is expressed in the work. My creations, all political and feminist, are based on a visual research of faces of horror, fear and grandeur. Picasso objectifies Dora Maar. I reread Picasso's work to put the woman-subject back at the center. Between painting and photography, tears and anger, my female figures are hybridized and disalienated in a pictorial form, like brutal collages, extremely free and unbridled." ORLAN