Petite Baigneuse (The Return to Chaos)

In Petite Baigneuse (The Return to Chaos), Tomlinson reworks Pablo Picasso’s Grande Baigneuse (1921), a painting associated with the post-war “return to order” movement, in which artists revived classical forms in search of stability, permanence and control. Tomlinson’s “return to chaos” overturns this impulse, removing Picasso’s bather from her idealised setting and trapping her within a dog’s water bowl.

The painting plays with the ambiguity of Picasso’s title. Despite being presented as “grand,” the original bather’s monumentality was largely a pictorial construction, produced through exaggerated proportions rather than actual scale. Tomlinson collapses this illusion by rendering the figure genuinely miniature. A Chihuahua towers over her, drinking from the bowl that serves as both bathing site and prison. Yet the bather remains entirely unfazed.

Through this inversion, Tomlinson exposes the instability of scale and authority within art history itself. The supposedly monumental figure becomes insignificant, while a breed associated with smallness assumes an overwhelming presence. Unable to escape the confines of either the bowl or the painting, the bather remains suspended in perpetual containment, meeting the threat of chaos with characteristic boredom and indifference.