Picasso fever has gripped the West this year and Hong Kong has been swept up, too. Exhibitions of the Spanish modernist's work at several commercial galleries in the city are occurring as significant Picasso works go on sale at international auction houses.
French art dealer Edouard Malingue opened his gallery in Central in September with an exhibition featuring 17 paintings and a notebook containing 23 sketches by the cubist master. Ben Brown Fine Arts opened its Picasso show on Wednesday, featuring 13 paintings spanning seven decades of Pablo Picasso's career.
Malingue reckons launching his Hong Kong gallery with a Picasso show will help put it on the map: 'He is the most famous artist of the 20th century and I thought it was the best way to catch people's attention,' he says.
All the works exhibited came from private collections. 'The idea was to show that the gallery was able to deal with collectors who own precious things, that we are able to show them to the public for a long time,' Malingue says. 'The fact that they are available is also a way to demonstrate that we can deliver good art to people who are interested in it.'
Brown, however, sees his Picasso show as a way to enrich a sometimes lacklustre art scene here. Having been in Hong Kong on and off for 42 years, he says: 'I hope I am doing my bit along with the other people in the art world to rectify that.'
Aiming to tap mainland collectors' growing love for Western masters, Sotheby's launches its inaugural selling exhibition of Impressionist and modern art in Hong Kong at the Grand Hyatt today. Of the 21 paintings exhibited, seven are Picassos. Other masters featured in the sale include Chagall, Monet, Renoir, Degas and Dali.