Otaïti is a striking example of Francis Picabia’s ‘transparencies’, a major body of works the artist made between c.1928 and c.1931. Leading from two figurative series Picabia made during the mid-late 1920s – the Espagnoles, portraying archetypal Spanish women, and the Monsters which traced multi-eyed creatures in heavy black outline – the transparencies moved dramatically away from the iconoclasm of the artist’s Dada period and his earlier mechanomorphic works.