Complexity means “reduction and removal of redundancy”, as first defined by the philospher John Locke (1632-1704): “Ideas thus made up of several simple ones put together, I call complex; such as beauty, gratitude, a man, an army, the universe.”, and as illustrated in art by Picasso in his famous bull drawing.

–-Jon Otto Fossum, Laboratory for Soft and Complex Matter Studies

via Vruz

 

Pablo Picasso created ‘Bull’ around the Christmas of 1945. ‘Bull’ is a suite of eleven lithographs that have become a masterclass in how to develop an artwork from the academic to the abstract. In this series of images, all pulled from a single stone, Picasso visually dissects the image of a bull to discover its essential presence through a progressive analysis of its form. Each plate is a successive stage in an investigation to find the absolute ‘spirit’ of the beast.