LONDON.- This Autumn, Omer Tiroche will open Picasso on Paper, an intimate collection of more than thirty works on paper by one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Marking the gallery’s rebrand and recent expansion into Modern Art, the exhibition is also timed to coincide with Picasso Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. Picasso on Paper provides a fascinating insight into the artist’s work, from the early 1900s up until his final years.

Since opening the Mayfair space in February 2015, Tiroche has worked privately across both Modern and Contemporary art. In light of the decision to publicly expand the gallery stable, the focus on Picasso – whose influence has impacted many eras beyond his own – seems inevitable. Mapping out the artist’s world entirely on paper, the exhibition documents an ongoing love affair with one simple material over several iconic periods.

As an essential part of Picasso’s draftsmanship, paper became the main outlet for the incessant reshaping of ideas. Using every scrap he could get his hands on - pages torn from books, sheets of tracing paper, the backs of café receipts, lined notepaper – he elevated the medium above its perceivable throwaway status. Subsequently, the selected works vary from a lyrical Rose Period watercolour (Saltimbanque et Jeune Fille, 1905) and a meticulous Analytical Cubist still-life (Nature Morte Cubiste, 1910), to the women Picasso once categorised as ‘either goddesses or doormats’. Immortalised on paper, his lovers are assigned their own – often cruel – imagery: Olga is almost an afterthought, a faint barely noticeable trace; sweet Marie-Thérèse is subservient and softly curved; Dora is made up entirely of awkward angles and blackened spikes.

Offering an unusual glimpse into Picasso’s melancholic side, the exhibition also includes poignant studies of artist and model, a series which began in 1963 as a way of coming to terms with the death of his great friend Matisse. The obsessive revisiting of this personal theme reveals a painful process of grief and self-contemplation. The painter’s image is worked and reworked, appearing to age with each permutation, as the nude model is transformed from being a captive sexual conquest into an immortal figure, always lying just outside the artist’s grasp.

These works on paper are the physical evidence behind the artist’s thoughts and genius: the birds, bulls, horses and goats he once admitted to preferring over human companionship; the personal metaphor of the harlequin and the bullfights of his childhood; his admiration for Gauguin and distant dreams of Tahiti. Picasso on Paper demonstrates the artist’s lifelong interest in the primal act of creation, and lays bare the bones of an extraordinary visual vocabulary.

Omer Tiroche comments, When I decided to expand the gallery vision to include Modern art, I couldn’t imagine anyone more suited than Picasso to mark this step. He was, and remains, the most influential artist of the 20th Century; his presence fits almost seamlessly with our Post War and Contemporary programme.