Picasso Sculpture is a sweeping survey of Pablo Picasso’s innovative and influential work in three dimensions. This will be the first such museum exhibition in the United States in nearly half a century.

Over the course of his long career, Picasso devoted himself to sculpture wholeheartedly, if episodically, using both traditional and unconventional materials and techniques. Unlike painting, in which he was formally trained and through which he made his living, sculpture occupied a uniquely personal and experimental status for Picasso. He approached the medium with the freedom of a self-taught artist, ready to break all the rules. This attitude led him to develop a deep fondness for his sculptures, to which the many photographs of his studios and homes bear witness. Treating them almost as members of his household, he cherished the sculptures' company and enjoyed re-creating them in a variety of materials and situations. Picasso kept the majority in his private possession during his lifetime.

It was only in 1966, through the large Paris retrospective Hommage à Picasso, that the public became fully aware of this side of his work. Following that exhibition, in 1967 The Museum of Modern Art organized The Sculpture of Picasso, which until now was the first and only exhibition on this continent to display a large number of the artist’s sculptures.

At the crossroads of art, literature and ethnography, this exhibition dedicated to Michel Leiris (1901-1990) is the first of its kind. As a prominent 20th century intellectual, though relatively unknown, Leiris was both a poet and an autobiographical writer, as well as a professional ethnographer and very close friend of many great artists and writers of his times.

Encompassing nearly 350 works, including many masterpieces by his closest artist friends (Miró, Masson, Giacometti, Picasso, Bacon…), African and Caribbean artefacts and works of art, a wide array of manuscripts, books, films and music, this exhibition aims at shedding light upon Michel Leiris' multi-faceted character, his passions and commitments. It equally sets out to highlight the innovative aspect of his oeuvre and the pertinence of his ideas, which, at a time of globalisation and post-colonial studies, have made him an essential contemporary reference.

To mark the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, an extensive exhibition on the theme of »Picasso in Contemporary Art« will be held from April 1 to July 12, 2015. As the opening presentation in the Deichtorhallen’s intensively renovated and modernized Hall for Contemporary Art, the show is dedicated to the overwhelming spectrum of modern and contemporary artists’ perspectives on Picasso. With approximately 200 works on loan − from London’s Tate Modern and Paris’s Centre Pompidou, among others − created by 90 internationally known artists, the show deals with Picasso and his impact on art without showing a single Picasso. Ranging between veneration, intellectual assimilation, and reinterpretation, the works by extremely famous artists, such as Georg Baselitz, Brassaï, Sophie Calle, Marlene Dumas, Jasper Johns, Martin Kippenberger, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Longo demonstrate the current relevance of Picasso’s work.

Picasso and Spanish Modernity will be showing some ninety works by Picasso and other artists, ranging from painting to sculpture, drawing, engraving and even film, thanks to the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi's synergistic cooperation with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. The works of art on display will include such celebrated masterpieces as Woman's Head (1910), Portrait of Dora Maar (1939) and The Painter and the Model (1963) by Picasso, Siurana, the Path (1917) and Figure and Bird in the Night (1945) by Miró and Dalí's Arlequin (1927), along with Picasso's drawings, engravings and preparatory paintings for his huge masterpiece Guernica (1937), none of which have been displayed outside Spain in such vast numbers before now.