Zanzara picasso biography

One of the most dominant and influential artists of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso was a master of endless reinvention. While significantly contributing to the movements of Surrealism, Neoclassicism and Expressionism, he is best known for pioneering the groundbreaking movement of Cubism alongside fellow artist Georges Braque in the s. In his practice, he drew on African and Iberian visual culture as well as the developments in the fast-changing world around him.

Throughout his long and prolific career, the Spanish-born artist consistently pushed the boundaries of art to new extremes. Picasso's oeuvre is famously characterized by a radical diversity of styles, ranging from his early forays in Cubism to his Classical Period and his later more gestural expressionist work, and a diverse array of media including printmaking, drawing, ceramics and sculpture as well as theater sets and costumes designs. 

Francis Bacon’s Seated Figure embodies one of the most essential themes running through the artist’s oeuvre: the impermanence of the human condition. A solitary figure sits cross-legged on a basic wooden chair in an otherwise empty interior – his meditative stance is juxtaposed by the rough smears that distort his flesh and present his body as if in a state of dissolution. In contrast to the flat and finely refined background, the painterly smudges that deconstruct the solidity of his presence insist on the fragility and transient nature of corporeality.

'What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance.'

 Bacon was a maverick for his use of realism, which was starkly different to the Modernist focus on abstraction that consumed most of his contemporaries. Nonetheless, Seated Figure distils the way in which Bacon played with realism; for instance, by adopting a semi-automatic mode of painting that renders the figure unrecognisable, and by parodying traditional laws of linear perspective. Not only is the figure distorted, but the room in which he is sat is constructed using askew and exaggerated lines of perspective which elicit a night

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