Picasso Baby

The Dot Project is delighted to be collaborating with AucArt, the world’s first auction house to specialise in early career contemporary art, as we unleash some of the freshest talents straight out of art school in our latest exhibition: Picasso Baby.

Picasso Baby brings together four London based emerging artists. Throughout the history of art, artists have always experienced a period of flux and uncertainty at the start of their careers. Art historians have labelled the early stage of Picasso’s career ‘the blue period’ (1901-1904). During this period he had relocated from Spain to Paris, similarly to today’s ever-migrating artists who move their studio practice constantly hungry for new inspiration. The beginning of a career is simultaneously the most vulnerable and exciting stage for artists both in the past and present. While external influences have changed in the last century, the artist’s journey remains constant. Today, there is an uncontrollable reliance and addiction to online persona, we are all prisoners of our own need for an existential status; beggars of constant attention, status updates, nudes in exchange for validation... Thematically parallel subjects that were considered to define ‘The Blue Period’ over a century ago.

This show explores what the Blue Period looks like for a contemporary artist today and examines how the internet and social media epidemic has blurred the lines between high and low art as a result of excessive accessibility, which provides us with an opportunity to view the Old, Modern and Contemporary Masters in one feed, but does a million likes make it a masterpiece?

We exist in a period of oversaturation, with constant access to streams of images, often digitally manipulated, not always appearing as they seem. Colour has always taken on an autobiographical role, reflecting a given artists’ past or present emotions, and subsequently their reactions to the world around. The artists seen in this show empathise with the early twentieth-century zeitgeist of the artistic and intellectual avant-garde through their innovative choices in medium, their bold use of colour and their attention to formal aspects of visual display.