Thursday, 28 November

MICAS, the Malta International Contemporary Arts Space, is mourning the passing of the celebrated Maltese artist Ray Pitrè (b. 1940), just weeks before an exhibition that was to feature a major, newly commissioned sculpture by the artist.

The sculpture, Figure In Rods, will be prominently positioned within the campus as part of MICAS’s permanent collection, will be unveiled in January 2025 and stand as a tribute to his artistic career.

“This is a great loss to the Maltese art world. Together with Pitrè, MICAS was working on an exhibition that would feature a display of his drawings, paintings and a smaller sculpture relating to the new outdoor sculpture commissioned from him,” said Phyllis Muscat executive chairperson of the MICAS board.

“Our condolences go to Ray Pitrè’s family – he is an indelible part of the Maltese art world and our heritage as a nation.”

Pitré built an extensive corpus of work that has been exhibited internationally in London, Berlin, Florence, Copenhagen, Brussels, Palermo, Algiers, New York and Kyoto. He represented Malta at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and his work is housed in national collections and other institutions.

“His work, including his portraiture, is manifest to a visual methodology that is informed by the landscapes and vocabularies of human experience. Entwined with events and processes in the world, his practice is also grounded in autobiographical memory and shifting personal geographies,” said Dr Georgina Portelli, MICAS deputy chairman and chair of its education committee.

“His body of work conveys intensity and action, trauma, death, traces and the ardently personal, all of which are recurring subject matters. These are revisited and rearticulated frequently through a wide variety of media.”

Born in 1940 soon after the first air raids on Malta started during World War II, Pitrè credited the surrealism of Salvador Dalì as his first brush with international art. Fate had other plans for him, first joining a monastic order in a short-lived stint, to finally join the police force while pursuing his artistic career. But it was at this point that he made his mark as one of the island’s foremost portrait painters, when he was called up by a senior ranking police officer to execute the portrait of then-prime minister, Dom Mintoff, in 1973.

The success of this portrait, his first such work, opened him up to a new commission of the portrait of Sir Anthony Mamo, Malta’s first President of the Republic.

With work on the first of his Scream series from the 1960s, and three successful exhibitions in the 1970s, Pitrè finally devoted himself entirely to art.

Ray Pitrè represented Malta at the 1999 Venice Biennale, where his work Guerrero was showcased alongside other notable Maltese artists and presented as a late postmodern exploration at La Tese in the Arsenale. 

In 2020, he was made a Member of the National Order of Merit of the Republic of Malta in 2000 for services to art.