PAINTER & MODEL: SKARSTEDT GALLERY CHELSEA
October 30, 2025 – December 20, 2025
PAINTER & MODEL:
SKARSTEDT GALLERY CHELSEA
October 30, 2025 –
December 20, 2025
Skarstedt Chelsea is
pleased to announce Painter/Model, an exhibition devoted to one of art
history’s most enduring subjects: the charged encounter between the artist and
their sitter. With a genealogy that stretches back to Vermeer’s The Art of
Painting (circa 1666-1668) and Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656),
the subject of the painter and model has over time developed into a distinct
genre within the history of art. As a pairing that dramatizes intimacy and
distance, invention and observation, power and vulnerability, the theme of the
painter and model has become a site for artists not only to rethink the act of
painting but also to probe the structures of power embedded in the act of
representation itself.
The exhibition revolves around Picasso’s extensive engagement with the subject
in 1963. For Picasso, who was over 80 years old at the time, his obsession with
the scene of creation suggests a certain anxiety about both his virtuosity and
his virility at this late stage of his life. As Marie-Laure Bernadac writes,
“Through all these manifold scenes, Picasso is asking himself the question, ‘What
is a painter? A man who works with brushes, a dauber, an unrecognized genius,
or a demiurge, a creator who mistakes himself for God?’” Through these frantic,
urgent compositions, Picasso strips painting down to its barest elements,
interrogating the very essence of painting as manifested in the primal
confrontation between man and woman.
While the eroticism of the female nude is worshipped and somewhat taken for
granted in Picasso’s work, later artists have exposed the fundamental asymmetry
of the painter/model relationship. For instance, in Eric Fischl’s (What is
there) Between the Artist and His Model (1994), it is as if the painter’s
gaze itself had aggressively thrown the model to the ground. While Fischl
reveals the latent violence of the painter’s desirous gaze, in her
painting, Arrangement (2010), Dana Schutz subverts the sexualization
of the female form through a grotesque reimagining of the painter and model
scene. While she borrows Picasso’s basic compositional structure, Schutz
replaces Picasso’s voluptuous woman with a monstrous hybrid that thwarts the
male gaze and threatens to lunge toward the powerless painter with its twisted
limbs. If Schutz contests the passivity of the female nude within the history
of art, Paula Rego and Cristina BanBan instead radically reclaim the artist’s
studio as a domain of female agency. Inspired by Balzac’s seminal allegory of
artistic creation, The Unknown Masterpiece, Rego’s The Balzac
Story (2011) inverts the traditional hierarchy between male painter and
female muse by replacing Balzac’s male protagonists with female artists,
engrossed in the act of creation. In a new, monumental diptych, Cristina BanBan
similarly reconceptualizes the artist’s studio as a distinctly female space,
where her heroic women are represented by and for each other.
Although she stages a similar role-reversal between male painter and female
model in The Painter and Her Model (2025), Chantal Joffe reimagines
the painter/model relationship as one of intimacy and reciprocity rather than
hierarchy. Despite the echoes of Picasso’s simplified figuration and Matisse’s
flattened space, Danielle Orchard likewise envisions the possibility of a
non-hierarchical relationship between painter and model, thereby underscoring
how the contemporary painter can cite, challenge, and expand upon the legacy of
her modernist forebears.
In this way, for the artists in this exhibition, the encounter between painter
and model often signals a more fundamental confrontation with the history of
representation. In Cogito, ergo sum (2025), Jameson Green –– freely
blending references to Picasso and Renaissance painting –– stages a
confrontation between the painter and the Crucifixion, the defining image of
Western culture, as if art history had itself become the painter’s ‘model’. A
similar porosity between aesthetic languages exists in KAWS’s practice, where
the scene of the artist at work is filtered through levels of art historical,
pop-cultural, and digital mediation such that the painting becomes a
meta-critical meditation on the status of the work of art in an image-saturated
world. In their distinct ways, Green and KAWS dismantle the fantasy of
immediacy implied by the scene of painter and model, as any claim to
originality dissolves in a dense network of cultural reference and art
historical appropriation.
For today’s generation of painters, the theme is in this way an inheritance to
be wrestled with, rewritten, and reclaimed. Taken as a
whole, Painter/Model demonstrates how a single subject, revisited
across time, can reveal the shifting stakes of art itself. The trope endures as
a framework through which artists can reinterpret tradition, press against its
limits, and stake out new ground for painting.
https://www.skarstedt.com/exhibitions/painter-model/press-release
DANA SCHUTZ
Arrangement, 2010
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 182.9
x 228.6 cm
@Skarstedt Gallery
ERIC FISCHL
(What is there) Between the Artist and His Model, 1994
Oil on Linen
Dimensions: 101.6
x 76.2 cm
@Skarstedt Gallery
PABLO PICASSO
Le Peintre et Son Modèle Dans un Paysage
10 May 1963
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 88.9
x 115.9 cm
@Skarstedt Gallery
PABLO PICASSO
Le Peintre et Son Modèle Dans un Paysage
15 June - 19
September 1963
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 130
x 195 cm
@Skarstedt Gallery
2. PRIMITIVISM & CUBISM
1906 - 1915
Source: Oxford University
Press
In his paintings
immediately prior to the early Cubist paintings of 1908, Picasso had initiated
the breakdown of illusionistic space that he was to pursue with an apparently
greater intellectual rigour through Cubism,
a style that over the course of a decade secured his prominent place in the
history of 20th-century art. For Picasso, however, the restraint of Cubism was
preceded by works exhibiting a raw intensity and violence in part stimulated by
his reading of non-Western art, and aligned with European currents of
primitivism (see Primitivism, §2).
This dialogue of apparently contrasting positions, between the intellect and
the emotions, between forms of classicism and expressionism and
between the conscious and the unconscious, provided the dynamic of much of
Picasso’s work.
Picasso and Fernande
Olivier spent the summer of 1906 in Gosol, a remote Catalan village in the
Pyrenees where he came to terms with his experience of Iberian sculptures from
Osuna, which he had seen in the Louvre in the spring. He began in his work to
make reference to forms of archaic art and to make expressive use of distortion
with insistently rhythmical repetitions and contrasts. In Gosol, Picasso made his
first carved sculptures. The resistance of wood produced simplified forms akin
to those in his paintings. Gauguin’s work in the same medium, the most
immediate European precedent available to Picasso, had been known to him
through Paco Durio, a previous tenant in the Bateau-Lavoir; its primitivism had
been given authority by the retrospective held at the Salon d’Automne in 1906,
and it offered access to another major stimulus, the art of the Pacific
Islands. At the same Salon ten paintings by the recently deceased Cézanne were
exhibited. Resolving his response to the achievements of these two artists
preoccupied Picasso over the next year and helped define his later work. On his
return to Paris, Picasso quickly completed his portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906;
New York, Met.; for illustration see Stein, (3)), which had been left
partly obliterated in the spring after over 80 sittings, giving her a mask-like
visage of monumental chiselled forms compressed within a shallow space. The
Stein portrait stands as a crucial shift from observation to conceptualization
in Picasso’s practice.
(I) ' LES DEMOISELLES
D'AVIGNON '
The primitivism
of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; New York, MOMA) was more shocking
still. While it gestated from a series of preparatory drawings and underwent
major overpaintings during its production, it does not so much summarize
Picasso’s previous work as reframe his understanding of painting; he called it
his ‘first exorcism picture’. This radical picture, seen by friends in his
studio and designated by various appellations, was put aside and shown publicly
only in 1916, when it was given its present title by Salmon. It was purchased
by the couturier Jacques Doucet in 1924 and acquired by the Museum of Modern
Art, New York, in 1939 at the time of Picasso’s retrospective. Embedded in its
matrix are the vestiges of Picasso’s encounters with 19th-century artists:
Ingres, Manet, Delacroix, Cézanne and Gauguin. Initially conceiving it as a
narrative brothel scene, Picasso changed it to a vertical format, adopted a
more discontinuous sense of space for the setting, removed the male visitors
and reorientated the women to confront the (implicitly male) viewer.
Controversy surrounded its stylistic disjunctures, confused by Picasso’s own
equivocal statements. Rubin (1984) has argued that Picasso reworked the
painting in late June and early July after a visit to the African and Oceanic
collections in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris. Although the
painting has defeated most efforts to specify African or Pacific sources, it
records Picasso’s reassessment of Gauguin’s primitivism and attests to the
revelations accorded by forms of non-Western carving in terms of conceptual
principles of representation and an emotively powerful evocation of magic and
ritual. Linking eroticism and the fear of death, the Demoiselles fixed
an image that was savage in style and violent in its dismemberment of the
female body.
In paintings such
as Mother and Child (1907; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 19) and wood-carvings
such as Figure (1907; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 238), Picasso probed the
fetishistic and conceptually simplifying aspects of primitivism. Although the
juxtaposition of discordant elements in the Demoiselles gave way to
internal pictorial coherence, in general his work of the following year
displays an astonishing diversity of handling. Picasso sundered and isolated
illusionistic conventions, using bright hues contrasted with subdued greys and
earth colours, striated hatchings against angular crumpled planes, and rhythmic
repetitions paired with bar-like outlines. In still-lifes painted in spring and
summer 1908 and landscapes executed in August at La Rue-des-Bois, Picasso
continued to reflect on the work both of Cézanne, which he had studied in depth
at the retrospective held at the Salon d’Automne of 1907, and of Henri
Rousseau, whom Picasso and Olivier fêted with a banquet in November.
By October 1907, and
probably earlier in the spring of that year, Apollinaire had introduced Georges
Braque to Picasso. In the winter of 1908–9 Picasso repainted his
monumental Three Women (St Petersburg, Hermitage). Possibly in
response to Braque’s Cézanne-influenced landscapes from the summer, in this
work and a number of still-lifes Picasso imposed a more consistent control both
on the surface and on illusions of space, after the example of Cézanne but with
a greater concern for physicality. In contrast to Picasso’s usual assertive
individualism, the invention of Cubism was
such a joint effort that even he and Braque sometimes had difficulty in
distinguishing each other’s work; Braque later described their relationship as
that of mountaineers roped together.
You may click below link
to reach Pablo Picasso’s news with more information from My Magical Attic.
https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2014/11/spanish-painter-pablo-picasso.html
JAMESON GREEN
Cogito, Ergo Sum, 2025
Oil, Pastel,
Acrylic and Caulk on Linen
Dimensions: 121.9
x 127 cm
@Skarstedt Gallery
DANIELLE ORCHARD
Quick Study, 2025
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 144.8
x 154.9 cm
@Skarstedt Gallery
KAWS
The Studio, 2025
Acrylic on
Canvas
Dimensions: 208.3
x 165.1 cm
@Skarstedt Gallery
PAULA REGO
The Balzac Story, 2011
Pastel on
Paper Mounted on Aluminum
Dimensions: 149.9
x 169.5 cm
@Skarstedt
Gallery
You may click below link to reach Paula Rego’s exhibition at Pera Museum
from My Magical Attic Blog.
https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2023/03/paula-rego-story-of-stories-at-pera.html
CHANTAL JOFFE
The Painter and Her Model, 2025
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 182.9
x 243.8 cm
@Skarstedt Gallery
CRISTINA BANBAN
Studio. El Prat, 2025
Oil on Linen,
in Two Parts
Dimensions: 200
x 300 cm
@Skarstedt Gallery
CRISTINA BANBAN (BORN
1987)
In BanBan’s paintings and works on paper, the
exaggerated portrayals of the female form configure into emotive compositions
imbued with intimacy and poise. Evading distinct narratives, the works fuse
references to the painterly canon of Modernism with the artist’s personal
memories and reflections on the present moment. Sinuous contours enveloping the
figures operate in contrast with planes of thick color, which evoke the parity
of human flesh and oil paint seen in the works of Willem de Kooning and Lucian
Freud.
Emphasizing the physicality of the human body,
BanBan’s tranquil characters appear to have clandestine power, their enormous
hands promising colossal strength. Engaged in melancholic contemplation, the
figures rarely meet each other’s gaze, pointing to the human isolation
inflicted by the social and political disruptions of recent years. BanBan’s
nudes are at times punctuated with intimate apparel or adorned with hoop
earrings and hair clips. They become resolutely contemporary, presenting
powerful images of women secure in their relationships and space. Often bearing
features of the artist, the paintings are in part autobiographical.
Cristina BanBan (b. 1987, Barcelona, Spain) lives and works in
Brooklyn. She earned her BFA in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona.
Recent solo exhibitions include Museum of Fine Arts at the Palace of Charles V,
Granada, Spain (2025); Skarstedt, New York (2024); Skarstedt, London (2023);
Perrotin, Tokyo (2023); Skarstedt, New York (2022-2023); Perrotin, Paris
(2022); Perrotin, Shanghai (2021); 1969 Gallery and Albertz Benda, New York
(2021); WOAW Gallery, Hong Kong (2020); 1969 Gallery, New York (2020); 68
Projects, Berlin (2019); the Dot Project, London (2018). BanBan has
participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Present
Generations at Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus (2021); The Hort Family
Collections, New York (2019); and Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2017, at
Royal Academy of the Arts, London. She was the recipient of a residency at
Palazzo Monti, Brescia (2019) and The Arts Club Prize, Royal Academy of Arts,
London (2017). Her work can be found in the permanent collections of Columbus
Museum of Art, Ohio; FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Fondation Louis Vuitton,
Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid,
Spain; and the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL.
https://www.skarstedt.com/artists/cristina-banban/biography
You may click below link
to reach Cristina Banban’s exhibition news from My Magical Attic …
https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2024/12/cristina-banban-at-skarstedt-gallery.html
SKARSTEDT GALLERY
Skarstedt
was founded in 1992 by Per Skarstedt to present a program of museum-level
exhibitions by contemporary European and American artists. Recognized for its
critically acclaimed historical exhibitions, Skarstedt works closely with
artists and estates to re-unite seminal bodies of work and offer focused
surveys of pivotal moments in the history of twentieth-century art.
Representing some of the most celebrated artists of their generations,
Skarstedt also mounts ground-breaking exhibitions of new work, which continue
to challenge the boundaries of contemporary identity.
Skarstedt
is committed to supporting and advancing the legacy of leading international
artists by showcasing their work across its gallery spaces in New York (Upper
East Side & Chelsea), London, and Paris. The gallery works with the
following artists and artists’ estates: Francis Bacon, Cristina BanBan, Georg
Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, George Condo, Willem de Kooning,
Nicolas de Staël, Yuan Fang, Eric Fischl, Günther Förg, Alberto
Giacometti, Keith Haring, Secundino Hernández, Jenny Holzer, Chantal
Joffe, Hans Josephsohn, KAWS, Mike Kelley, Yves Klein, Jeff Koons, Barbara
Kruger, Joan Miró, Juan Muñoz, Albert Oehlen, Marco Pariani, Steven Parrino,
Pablo Picasso, Richard Prince, David Salle, Jana Schröder, Thomas Schütte,
Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Andy Warhol, Rebecca Warren, Sue Williams,
Christopher Wool, and The Estate Martin Kippenberger in collaboration with
Galerie Gisela Capitain Cologne.
https://www.skarstedt.com/galleries
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