Iconografias de violência e esperança: a Pietà na obra de Graça Morais

Representing the Virgin Mary holding the martyred body of her son, Jesus Christ, the Pietà is an iconic motif in Christian culture. By focusing on the representation of the mother’s pain in the face of her son’s exposure to violence and death, this iconography became popular beyond its religious sense, being continually revisited by artists to this day. This article discusses the representation of Pietà in the Portuguese painter Graça Morais’ work at different production stages from the beginning of the 1980s to the present day. The theme assumes countless formalizations in her work, concerning either traumatic individual experiences or the manifestation of her daily anxieties in the face of the dramas and hopes of the human being, within a violent world.