Naomi Campbell will supply a supermodel’s perspective on the intimate relationship between artist and muse in an essay for an upcoming exhibition of Pablo Picasso work being staged by Nahmad Modern in Switzerland. The New York-headquartered gallery was based in 2013 by Joseph Nahmad, a scion of the billionaire art-dealing household. Nahmad’s father, David Nahmad, is believed to have the biggest non-public assortment of works by Picasso.
The present, to be staged at Tarmak22 gallery in Gstaad from 14 February to fifteen March, will embrace 14 works from the Picasso sequence Le Peintre et son modèle (the painter and his mannequin), accomplished late in Picasso’s life between 1963 and 1965, although he explored this basic motif repeatedly all through his profession.
An accompanying essay by Campbell—a longtime pal of the Nahmad household—attracts from “her lived expertise of inhabiting the gaze”, in accordance with the gallery, which invited Campbell to participate.
“I’ve lived most of my life in entrance of the digital camera, which supplies me a singular perspective on the connection between artist and mannequin. It’s advanced, layered and charged with energy,” Campbell stated in an announcement.
Pablo Picasso’s Le Peintre et son modèle (The painter and his mannequin), 1963, oil on canvas. ©2026 Property of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The sequence of work scrutinise need, intimacy and energy between an artist at his easel and the nude girl posing earlier than him. Picasso produced the works shortly after marrying the lady who would show to be his remaining spouse, Jacqueline Roque, who was greater than 4 many years his junior. The gallery says the mannequin in every could also be a stand-in for Jacqueline. Work included within the exhibition embrace works beforehand exhibited at establishments together with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Fondation Beyeler exterior Basel, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In her essay, Campbell writes that the Le Peintre et son modèle sequence struck a chord along with her, given the parallels within the dynamic between a mannequin and painter and a mannequin and photographer—a relationship she’s grown aware of over her decades-long profession.
“In a world the place visibility is handled as forex and self-exposure is mistaken for energy, these works really feel particularly related,” Campbell writes. “They ask us to think about what it means to look, and to be checked out, at a second when photos flow into endlessly and intimacy is more and more flattened.”
