Olyvia Kwok is to present an exhibition of exquisite drawings by modern and contemporary masters, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Christo and Keith Haring at her London gallery in October.

“Black on Paper” heralds the expansion of Olyvia Oriental, a gallery specialising in contemporary Chinese and Asian art, into Western modern and contemporary art.  To emphasize this extra dimension of the gallery, it will be re launched as Olyvia Fine Art. L'écuyère, one of the exhibited pieces, was originally part of an important sketchbook of thirty Picasso drawings, which was subsequently split up.  As Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, has observed, “Old age is the principal theme of these dazzling drawings, in which the sardonic artist allegorizes ruefully but never self-pityingly the humiliating plight of an eighty-nine year old lothario with a burnt-out libido. The resultant images are dream images.  As in a dream, everything - time, place, identity-is in a state of flux. Especially relevant to this sketchbook is the fact that at the age of fourteen, Picasso took as his first mistress an equestrienne called Rosita del Oro, and that, a lifetime later, she reappears in different guises, first of all in his prints and then, as here, in his drawings. …(In L'écuyère) Rosita has aged into an over-made-up virago, who  does the splits while berating a craven-looking Picasso for failing  to clean up the circus ring with his broom.” Also included will be a Salvador Dali, Composition Au Cygne et a l’Elephant (1947), which is linked to a project of collaboration with Walt Disney in 1945, and works by Henri Matisse from the 1940s and Marc Chagall in the 1950s.