Salvatore of Lucan, Me Ma Healing Me, 2020

Salvatore of Lucan

Me Ma Healing Me, 2020

Edition of 30, Signed and numbered

368 mm x 380 mm 

This Limited Edition print was created on the occasion of the exhibition of the Zurich Portrait Prize, running at the National Gallery, Dublin, 13th November 2021 – 3 April 2022. 

Salvatore of Lucan is the 2021 winner of the Zurich Portrait Prize. This is his third inclusion, previously nominated for Me and My Dad in McDonalds in 2018 and Lucy with 3 hands and me holding onto her leg, which was highly commended in 2019. In addition, he was nominated for the RHA Hennessy Craig Award in 2019 and is a recipient of the Art Council of Ireland’s Next Generation Artists Award.

Salvatore of Lucan’s mother practices sound healing and Reiki. Anytime he is at home and feeling unwell, his mother offers to practice her healing methods on him. He is admittedly a distant son and explains that he can be skeptical about some of the ’hippy stuff‘, but when her hands hover above him, he does feel his mother’s love, and is aware that she is trying to heal him. In making the painting, Salvatore was inspired by the kind of uncanny, suspended feeling one finds in the alchemist paintings of Leonora Carrington. Salvatore of Lucan creates large-scale works in an attempt to communicate a sense of the world he inhabits. Exploring home, identity and relationships, he creates expansive domestic scenes where the familiar approaches the magical.