Artworks1995Formerly Known as After Picasso

A lumped clay form with two thumb shaped holes, displayed on a plinth.

This lumpen, baked clay figure was made after the artist visited the Picasso Museum, Paris in 1994. He identified a chronological moment when Picasso had recognized his own value as an artist and begun to produce a prolific amount of artworks that had a shorthand mark of the artist about them. The mark or the process as a signature. This is the confidence of an artist who is no longer struggling to communicate but is talking fluently in Picasso-ese. The rest of the world looks on and marvels uncomprehendingly. Knowing that he is in full flow and recognizing his star quality but the dialogue is no longer with an audience.
The artist made this artwork as an experiment with this theory: could he make a piece of work that had the confidence of Picasso, the increasingly acknowledged master of twentieth-century art? With two fat thumb indentations could he express something profound? The working title ‘After Picasso’ was renamed ‘Formally Known As…’ to give some distance to the idea – not a homage but a study, a play on the word ‘formal’.