Picasso's feats of clay shine in light fantastic

AS FAR as Sophie Hicks, the arch-minimalist, is concerned, her design for the new Picasso ceramics show at the Royal Academy is verging on the fussy.

"This is more than I have ever done before for an exhibition," she said, amazed at herself.

In truth, the look she has given the high-ceilinged rooms at the gallery in Piccadilly, central London, is almost entirely pared down. The colourful pots, bowls and figures that Pablo Picasso fashioned or painted, or both, while in Vallauris, southern France, in the late Forties and early Fifties are displayed on long slabs of concrete. The slabs are at table height and deliberately have the appearance of stone.

Ms Hicks intends them to echo the shape and the solidity of the kind of ancient tables and platforms used in religious worship. "At first, we wanted the pots to appear to just float in the rooms in some way," she said, "but then we realised the galleries were too big for that. The work would just be lost."

Ms Hicks, the former fashion editor of Vogue magazine, who became an architect and then worked with the clothes designer Paul Smith on his impossibly trendy Westbourne House emporium in west London, has been working on the Picasso exhibition since February.

This is not her first collaboration with the academy, however: she was also the architect on "Sensation", last year's phenomenally successful exhibition of Charles Saatchi's collection of contemporary work by young British artists.

"My work for the Picasso is not at all the same as with "Sensation", where I tried to get the maximum contrast with the decor of this building as possible, even to the extent of removing modern signs and fittings," she recalled. "With that exhibition, I felt some of the modern works actually looked better here than they had in the modern galleries."

With Picasso's ceramics her approach was to allow the work to look very real and touchable. "I wanted a very flat light, a neon light and I don't mind the fittings showing at all.

"It is very different to working on a shop, where you are trying to make things look precious. These pots are precious and so you want to make their surroundings as basic as possible." After this exhibition, Ms Hicks plans to leave the fine-art world for a while and work on the construction of a new hotel in Argentina.

The exhibition `Picasso, Painter and Sculptor in Clay' runs from 17 September to 16 December