Pieta

In both his public art works, as well as his gallery-bound work, Tony Tasset draws from a variety of populist artistic languages to slyly critique and memorialize the current American condition.

Pieta depicts an older man who holds a youth’s limp form. It draws on Michelangelo’s standing Rondanini Pietà in which the mournful Mary holds the dead body of Christ. Tasset carried this monumental sense of grief into this work, but the figures’ clothes and hair place them securely in the present.

Who are the figures depicted? The sculpture leaves room for speculation and universal meanings, although viewers who know the artist will immediately recognize the figures of the artist and his son Henry (who is alive and well). Like Pieta, much of Tasset’s work during the 2000s explored his conflicting roles as both urban artist and suburban husband and father. Tasset has said, “we all live in our own little kingdoms of desire, fear, consumption and delusion. I thought maybe if I got intimate or honest enough in my work, I could find some shared humanity with my audience.”