Winner: Me Ma Healing Me

Painting of a bearded man reclining in a chair while a woman wearing a green shawl bends over him and her hands hovering over his body — Salvatore of Lucan, Me Ma Healing Me, 2020. © Salvatore of Lucan

Winner of the Zurich Portrait Prize 2021

Salvatore of Lucan

Me Ma Healing Me, 2020

Oil on canvas

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 sceptical 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.

< Back to the full shortlist