‘Picasso’s Studio, Bateau Lavoir’ by Damian Elwes

‘Picasso’s Studio, Bateau Lavoir’ by Damian Elwes is a digital archival print from a reconstruction of one of Picasso’s studios. Elwes first began painting artists studios in the 1980s, beginning with contemporary artists in Paris. Much later, after spending 7 years in the Columbian rainforest, Elwes returned to LA and the first thing he did was to buy a computer. “The first thing I googled was Picasso’s Bateau Lavoir studio,” he says. Nine small photographs appeared on the screen and Elwes began to draw from them, trying to reconstruct a studio long since destroyed. “But I couldn’t make sense of what the studio looked like,” he says. “Then I saw the hand of one of the Demoiselles d’Avignon in one of the photographs. I looked at the others, and there was the arm of the opposite demoiselle in another photo. I printed up ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,’ and suddenly I could attach all the photographs together like a jigsaw puzzle and see what it looked like. That was the breakthrough painting. I wanted to be a fly on the wall and see what was going on in the studio of my heros.” That was how it began and Elwes has since made at least 200 paintings of artists studios including Matisse, Gauguin, Cezanne, Hockney, Liechtenstein and Basquiat.

This print is signed by the artist and numbered from an edition of 100.