The exhibition ‘Picasso on Paper’ is the first of eleven exhibitions that are part of ‘Boijmans Next Door’, a unique partnership with other museums in Rotterdam that will keep part of Boijmans’ collection visible in the city over the next few years.

The exhibition of prints by Pablo Picasso is on view at the Kunsthal until 12 May. Picasso’s paintings and sculptures are well known, but his prints are less frequently exhibited.

For Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), printmaking was an art form that allowed him to experiment to his heart’s content. Picasso made more than 2500 prints, using the most diverse techniques. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection contains almost four hundred prints by Picasso, more than seventy of which are now on display in the Kunsthal. Among the highlights of the exhibition ‘Picasso on Paper’ are his coloured linocuts of subjects including still lifes, bullfights, mythological scenes and women. Picasso learned the coloured linocut technique in 1958, when he was already in his late seventies.

‘That Picasso was a genius is clear from his prints, a medium in which he constantly rediscovered himself as an artist. In the Kunsthal, Boijmans is showing the most beautiful examples from the museum’s extensive collection of his prints, with an emphasis on the spectacular coloured linocuts that he made between 1958 and 1963’, says Peter van der Coelen, the museum’s curator of prints and drawings.

Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga in the south of Spain in 1881. His father was a painter, an art teacher and curator at a local museum. Picasso exhibited a great talent for drawing at an early age, and his father taught him figure drawing and oil painting from the age of seven. In 1895, following the death of Picasso’s sister from diphtheria, the family moved to Barcelona. There Picasso was admitted to the Escuela de Bellas Artes at the age of thirteen after his father convinced the school to allow him to sit the entrance exam. Later he was sent to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, the leading art school in Spain. At the age of sixteen, he turned his back on formal education and determined his own artistic path.

As the co-inventor of Cubism, Picasso was one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. He worked in a great diversity of styles in a broad range of media including painting, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics and poetry. Throughout his long career, Picasso continued to reinvent himself, taking inspiration from his direct environment and a succession of female muses.