At the end of the Carmen Calvo (Valencia, 1950) exhibition at the Museu Picasso, the pleading moan of a doll is heard: “Mom, I’m hungry”. The voice comes from a large wooden box, inside which we can only peek through a tiny peephole, hundreds of stuffed animals, dolls and other children’s toys are piled up, among which a male mannequin can be seen with its face hidden behind a black mask. The installation, A cage to live in, is surrounded by drawings of children who have been violated, mutilated or tortured, and is inspired by the true story of a seven-year-old girl who in 1997 was locked up for weeks in a cage for parental punishment. What else can we feel that she is not a pang of anguish and terror?

“We are facing a strong social criticism that aims to make visible the vulnerability and suffering that children can experience in the hands of adults,” says Emmanuel Guigon, curator together with Victoria Combalía of the first large exhibition in a Barcelona museum of Carmen Calvo, one of the brightest and most unique voices of his generation. Her work is always a narration of a personal story that connects with a collective story, with her way of seeing and feeling.

We see it on that balcony overlooking his creative universe, which is the enlarged image of his workshop, through which we access the first room: an intimate and mysterious space whose shelves accumulate childhood memories, photographs of people who They are not there and perhaps he did not know, broken mannequins, scraps of notebooks and magazines, junk found in flea markets and flea markets that Calvo subtly and intelligently redefines to plot a poetic and fierce criticism against violence within the family, the silencing of women, the repression of sexuality or the educational system.

The exhibition covers Calvo’s career, from a 1969 painting in which a hunter with a shotgun grabs a naked woman without arms by the hair, as if it were a rabbit, to works made during confinement, such as the film collage It’s not a dream! It’s really happening! , made with frozen images of films that have influenced her work, from Psycho to Rosemary’s Baby or Eyes Wide Shut. Nor has the artist missed the opportunity of exhibiting at Picasso’s house to intervene, with humor, in the collection of postcards of works by the artist from Malaga that are sold in the museum shop.

There is everything he wants to say about the Picasso criticized from feminism as misogynist and abuser. “I’m not going to get into that chase,” he cuts off. And he drops: “I’m not interested in his life, I’m interested in his work. While he was painting Les señoritas de Avignon, what was Sorolla doing?

National Prize of Plastic Arts 2013, Calvo represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 1977 in a one-on-one with Joan Brossa promoted by Combalía herself, who has recovered for the exhibition the huge school blackboards that today form part of the collections of the Queen Sofia. As if they were fetishes or ex votos, the artist inserts disturbing and surreal objects on the wax: brass buckets full of plaster shells, corsets, dismembered legs, underwear… The artist also manipulates mannequins, which she shows without heads , couples of bodies that could evoke aggression or erotic games between women. And to underline the alienation and repression that human beings can be subject to, she intervenes in photographs taken from a family album, turns them into a negative, puts masks on them, covers their eyes or blurs their faces with large brushstrokes of paint.