Friday, 10 January 2025

The legacy of one of Malta’s leading lights in contemporary arts found its rightful place at Malta’s newly opened contemporary arts museum MICAS, which yesterday unveiled the late Ray Pitrè’s final sculpture, Figure In Rods, commissioned specifically for the musuem.

The newly commissioned sculpture will be permanently and prominently positioned within the campus as part of MICAS’s permanent collection.

MICAS executive chairperson Phyllis Muscat welcomed members of Pitrè’s family to MICAS, where together with Minister for National Heritage and the Arts Owen Bonnici, officially declared open an exhibition of Pitrè’s works.

MICAS executive chairperson Phyllis Muscat said the commissioning and permanent placement of Figure in Rods both celebrates the artistic legacy of one of Malta’s finest artists, and underlines MICAS’s mission to bring Maltese art and artists into conversation with an international artistic community.

“Our mission is to internationalise Maltese contemporary art. Pitrè’s opus today joins those of Ugo Rondinone, Cristina Iglesias and Conrad Shawcross here at MICAS, enriching our cultural offering for our visitors.”

Muscat announced a new educational programme for schools that would see students involve themselves in contemporary art, using works such as Pitrè’s, whose experimentation with discarded materials he would integrate into his works of art, as a reference point for artistic development.

Minister Owen Bonnici, who inaugurated the Pitrè exhibition, said MICAS’s commissiong of Figure In Rods was a clear declaration on the quality and significance of Maltese contemporary art. “This work, with its deep exploration of human identity and psychological landscapes, exemplifies not only Pitrè’s diversity of practice, but also Malta’s contemporary cultural ambitions.

“Pitrè’s legacy goes beyond this extraordinary piece: he paved the way for experimental art in Malta, he widened this artistic conversation, showing how Maltese art can address universal themes. His body of work incorporates the essence of what MICAS is promoting: art that engenders a Maltese experience can find a global audience.”

MICAS deputy chairperson Dr Georgina Portelli said MICAS was also carrying out a digitisation initiative that would create an archive capturing the vibrant history of Maltese contemporary art, having documented the conversations and technical discussions from start to end between Pitrè and the artist and sculptor Austin Camilleri, as well as the casting process for Figure In Rods.

Storytelling Pitrè: how Figure In Rods marks the start of MICAS’s mission to document Maltese contemporary art

“Capturing the stories of contemporary art as they happen is crucial to understanding our cultural identity. We are conscious of the lacunae in systematically documenting contemporary artists and their works… Through our work with Ray Pitrè, we have established a model for future collaborations – one that emphasises not only the creation of art but also the preservation of the artistic journey itself.”

MICAS Artistic Director Edith Devaney said MICAS’s next gallery exhibition will bring together the work of six of Malta’s most accomplised artists working today, under a shared theme, which will be curated across all three floors of the gallery spaces.

“Our programme must be marked by innovation and a commitment to the highest artistic and intellectual standards so that we position MICAS at the forefront of identifying and interrogating new tendencies and emerging trends in contemporary art… bringing complex and challenging works of contemporary art from around the world to Malta will be catalytic to the artistic and cultural communities, and the opposite is also true: this permanent sculpture and the exhibition by Ray Pitrè is testament to that.”

The temporary display exhibition, curated by the Washington-based Maltese art historian Joseph Paul Cassar, a leading expert on modern and contemporary Maltese art, is open to paying visitors at MICAS, who get to enjoy access to the Joana Vasconcelos exhibition (open until 31 March 2025), and other works by Conrad Shawcross and Ugo Rondinone.

Ray Pitrè exhibition open up until 29 June, 2025