THE YOUNG LADIES OF AGIGNON - 1994 - 2024

“The increasingly pronounced transformation of Picasso into a recognizable commodity of mass culture, especially within the society of the information spectacle, becomes an inexhaustible resource for benign-critical statements, such as Valeriu Mladin’s installation The Young Ladies of Avignon – The Blue Period, which refers not only to Picasso’s ever more revealed and debated love life (already since the 1990s) – with all its complications and abuses – but also to the growing social awareness of the overexposure and commercial manipulation of femininity.”

Erwin Kessler, excerpt from the text (D)EFECTUL PICASSO, published in the exhibition catalogue “The Picasso Effect”, hosted by MARe – Museum of Recent Art Bucharest, 2023–2024

The Young Ladies of Avignon – The Blue Period is a ready-made installation first exhibited in 1994, within the group show Picasso Looks at Picasso, organized in Bucharest at the Hungarian Cultural Center, and later, in a different version, at the World Trade Center Bucharest a few years later.

The third version was included in the exhibition The Picasso Effect, hosted by MARe – Museum of Recent Art Bucharest in 2023–2024, where it was displayed in direct dialogue with Picasso’s works.

The title of the work ironically refers both to Picasso’s famous painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, considered a landmark of modern painting, and to his early Blue Period. It is a deliberate play on words, meant to twist the references and open up other meanings, otherwise easy to grasp.

Visually, the ready-made installation also recalls Yves Klein’s canvases imprinted with nude bodies painted in his iconic blue during his celebrated performances, as well as the term “blue blood,” traditionally used by Spanish aristocracy.

It should be noted that when the first two versions of The Young Ladies of Avignon were exhibited, there were no public commercials for sanitary pads (with blue liquid). These invaded the everyday visual environment only many years later.