Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia studied at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris from 1894. Initially he was influenced by the Barbizon school in particular; inspired by his acquaintance with Camille Pissarro, the artist then adopted the Impressionists' style of painting. As early as 1905, the first solo exhibition of sixty-one landscape paintings was held at the Haussmann Gallery in Paris, followed in 1909 by an examination of Fauvist and Cubist influences. In the course of his work Picabia has worked with movements such as Dada, Cubism and Surrealism.
The artist made friends with Marcel Duchamp and also established contacts with Apollinaire, Delaunay, Kupka and Léger. In 1912 he also participated in the group exhibition Section d'Or, in which the most important representatives of Cubism participated. The way of painting, which now also used Picabia from 1912, is called "Orphism" by Apollinaire.
During his stays in New York between 1913 and 1917, the artist was in exchange with Man Ray and Alfred Stieglitz. Inspired by the influence of his friend Duchamp, Picabia developed his own exploration of Dadaism and created drawings and pictures of machines in an ironic manner. With his Dadaist poetry and literary commitment, Picabia is one of the most aggressive and nihilistic representatives of this movement. Until 1924 he was co-editor of the Dadaist magazine 391, while also writing for Tristan Tzara's Zurich DADA magazine. When he finally joined the Swiss Dada Group in 1918, following Tzara's invitation, he became the liaison between the Zurich and Paris Dada movements after returning to Paris in 1919. But Francis Picabia also joined the surrealist movement founded by Bréton in 1924. When the artist moved to Mougins in southern France in 1926, material pictures and the so-called monster pictures were created in aggressively bright colours. Inspired by Romanesque frescoes, he began in the late 1920s with his Transparencies - paintings painted in several layers of transparent paint on top of each other to create a three-dimensional space.
When he returned to Paris in 1945, his encounter with Matta, Soulages and Hartung led him back to abstraction. The new dot images - metaphors for germ cells, plant parts and phalli - are shown in the Deux Iles gallery. Picabia's artistic activity comes to an end with increasing arteriosclerosis and a stroke. 1953, on 30 November, Francis Picabia dies in Paris.

Among others, retrospective exhibitions of the Deichtorhalle Hamburg, the Kunsthalle Krems, the Kunsthaus Zürich and the MoMA New York were dedicated to Picabia's work.