Peter
The iconographic type of Pieta in the western Christian tradition is one of the most captivating depictions of the emotional life of the Virgin Mary and Jesus—mother and son. The compassion which this scene has evoked since the High Middle Ages, began to be saturated from sources other than exclusively religious ones in the 19th and 20th centuries. It was intersected by art movements such as Symbolism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and became the universal metaphor of suffering and resignation; it was transformed into everyday images and scenes pursuing social and political themes of communities and society. New commentaries on classical master artwork are also frequent—starting with the Gothic, intimate scenes of the couple joined in pain, through the feverish Mannerist and Baroque sacraments up to the frequently re-interpreted Pieta of Michelangelo. In contemporary visual art, the Pieta as one of the distinctive elements of religious symbolism, has become an object of provocative and manipulative gesture, a confrontation of the traditional and the topical, the immediate and the universal. Or it is a study, as in Peter Machata’s collection entitled Mother and Son, where the spirituality and timeless communicativeness of the scene represented a possibility to experiment in the environment of jewelry in the form of unorthodox sculpting methods / materials. And to test their professional and personal limits.
—Viera Kleinová