Part of the Underdogs Public Art Program, check all murals here

With a single glance, Medusa transformed beauty into terror and men into stone. One of the most enduring figures of Greek mythology, she embodies contradiction: monster and victim, fragile and powerful, feared and revered. From antiquity to Caravaggio’s iconic painting, her image has been used both as a warning and as protection. In contemporary culture, Medusa has been reclaimed as a feminist symbol, a figure of resistance and rage that refuses to be silenced. She endures because she is never one thing alone — always ambivalent, always alive in our collective imagination.

Spanish artist duo PichiAvo draw from this vast mythological universe, reanimating gods, heroes, and legends in the context of contemporary urban art. Their murals and sculptures translate the grandeur of classical antiquity into vibrant, large-scale works that speak to the present. In dialogue with them stands Portuguese artist Add Fuel, whose intricate reinvention of the azulejo tradition overlays ornament and memory, layering fragments of cultural history into new and unexpected patterns. Though different in form and reference, both practices converge around a shared concern: how the past is continually reinterpreted and materialised in the present.

This convergence took shape in Memória Material, an exhibition presented at Underdogs Gallery between June and August 2025. Far from a collective show, it was conceived as a creative alliance. Through their unmistakable and unique styles, both artists were challenged to work together to create a new inventory that materialises memory in diverse techniques, and dissolves hierarchies between the scholarly and the popular, Beaux-Arts and urban art, the monumental and the accessible, the nostalgia of the past and the burnout of modernity.

Now, this collaboration extends into the streets of Lisbon with a monumental mural of 180sqm, at its centre the face of Medusa. Inscribed into the city’s fabric, she becomes guardian and witness, a presence that resists erasure. Just as tiles fracture and recombine into new patterns, and myths are retold across centuries, this Medusa reminds us that memory is never fixed. It is always in motion, reinvented by every hand daring to draw it anew.

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