Louvre Abu Dhabi has unveiled Picasso, The Figure, a landmark exhibition that brings the artist’s lifelong fascination with the human body into sharp focus and does so on a scale the UAE has never seen before. The show runs from 21 January to 31 May 2026 and is positioned as one of the museum’s key highlights of the year.
The exhibition presents around 130 works (paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and ceramics), making it the largest Picasso presentation yet at Louvre Abu Dhabi. Most pieces come from the Musée national Picasso–Paris, joined by loans from major institutions in France, Qatar, Lebanon, and the wider region, as well as works from the collections of Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi. Together, they trace how Picasso reinvented the figure again and again over seven decades.
Structured into five thematic sections, the exhibition follows the artist’s shifts from early Cubist fragmentation, influenced by Iberian, African, and Oceanic art, through his “return to classicism” after the First World War, to the Surrealist hybrids and bold, emotionally charged bodies of his late work. Curators frame these formal evolutions through enduring mythological archetypes — Minotaurs, musketeers, matadors — which allowed Picasso to test the boundaries between humanity and animality, vulnerability and violence.
Alongside major canvases, such as “Woman with a Mandolin” (1911), “Portrait of a Seated Woman” (1923), and “Woman Sitting in Front of the Window” (1937), visitors encounter sequences of drawings and prints that show how rapidly Picasso could move from almost classical figuration to radical distortion. Early rooms make clear how his encounters with non‑European sculpture pushed him towards faces and bodies reduced to mask‑like signs and fractured planes: a visual language that would crystallise into Cubism.
A pivotal section is devoted to “Guernica” and its afterlives, where Dora Maar’s studio photographs and archival material reconstruct the making of the painting and its circulation as an icon of 20th‑century violence. Here, the dialogue with Arab modernism becomes explicit. Works by Dia al‑Azzawi and other regional artists pick up on Picasso’s broken bodies and limited palettes to speak of wars and traumas in Baghdad, Beirut, or elsewhere in the Arab world, showing how his visual vocabulary travelled far beyond Europe and was recharged with new histories.
Cécile Debray, President of the Musée national Picasso–Paris, describes the exhibition as built from “the world’s richest collection of works by Picasso” and developed “in a spirit of exchange” with Louvre Abu Dhabi, to explore how the artist “constantly reinvented the representation and expressiveness of the human figure: from the hieratic signs of Cubism to the classical bodies of the 1920s and the hybrid beings of his Surrealist period.” Louvre Abu Dhabi Director Manuel Rabaté calls it “a first‑of‑its‑kind exhibition at Louvre Abu Dhabi that looks at the legacy of one of the defining artists of the 20th century, inviting visitors to experience an exceptional selection of works spanning the key phases of his career.”
The curatorial team emphasises that the exhibition “looks at Picasso through the lens of mythology” and centres on a universal question — the figure — which he explored across media throughout his life. By placing Arab modernist artists in the same narrative arc, the show highlights the depth of cross‑cultural exchange and allows national and regional collections to be seen alongside masterpieces from Paris.
A rich public programme extends the exhibition beyond the galleries: curatorial talks and a conversation with Dia al‑Azzawi, film screenings such as “The Mystery of Picasso” and “Young Picasso”, a Masquerade night blending performance and music, as well as drawing sessions, bookable easels, and a dedicated children’s trail with prompts and games.
Thus, Picasso, The Figure becomes a platform for reflecting on how we see bodies, myths, and histories at a time when images of violence and vulnerability circulate globally.
To learn more about Picasso, The Figure, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you might be interested in reading our articles about other masterpieces one can view at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. We also recommend that you read about a variety of activities offered by the museum.
