In what concerns the animal form or shape, Western visual production relies in conceptions that establish a fundamental separation between human and animal. This notion will become the underlying base for a tradition wherein the animal form is used as an intermediary for communication and thought about different aspects regarding human nature. The goal of this dissertation is to analyse the representation and presentation of animals in the Visual Arts between 1980 and 2010, whether they should occur under natural forms or whether invested with hybridisms. It seeks to analyse the ways in which contemporary visual production operates over a patrimony of iconographic and symbolic tradition, such as medieval bestiaries and physiognomy in arts, updating them under contemporary concerns. For their use of the animal form as a recurrent visual motif, the works of three contemporary artists shall be analysed: those of Paula Rego, within the fields of drawing and painting; those of Jan Fabre, within sculpture and installation; and those of Eduardo Kac, whose productions rethinks the artistic medium, all the while keeping in mind the place and time of exhibition of the art work. Spurred by the work of Eduardo Kac, this analysis will include as well hybridism in contemporary art that concerns the animal form. It operates not only within representation but at also an in vivo level, through artistic notions that transgress from artefact production to the fabrication of organisms with never seen before qualities, being simultaneously object and subject. For last, it will be presented the personal artistic project, one of a pictoric nature, and whose subject is related to a mingling of the iconographic heritage from an erudite tradition of the History of Art with another related to popular culture, such as animated television series and dinosaurs

Tese de mestrado, Pintura, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas Artes, 2012