Sylvette - Pablo Picasso & Carl Nesjar

Sylvette looms over the street as a massive, white concrete slab, its surface etched with the stark, bold lines of a woman’s face in profile. Picasso drew the original sketch of Sylvette David in nineteen fifty-four, but he could not carve it himself at this scale. He handed the task to Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar. Nesjar used a high-pressure sandblasting technique to bite into the concrete, revealing the dark gray aggregate underneath to create the deep, permanent shadows of Picasso’s iconic drawing.