Saturday, 9 May

The Malta International Contemporary Art Space has officially opened its latest exhibition by the acclaimed Californian artist Reggie Burrows Hodges (b. 1965, Compton) in his first-ever European solo exhibition.

Reggie Burrows Hodges: Mela, running from 9 May up until the 30 August, is the most ambitious body of work of Reggie Burrows Hodges’s career, which include the largest canvases of his career as they take over the entire gallery floors and walls of MICAS.

The exhibition includes Hodges’s painting Mamajamma, a feat of production at over 4.5 metres tall and over 8m wide, which dominates the historic walls of MICAS and is a colossal work in response to Caravaggio’s work The Beheading of St John the Baptist.

The exhibition marks a new chapter in the history of MICAS, with Hodges having forged an important relationship with the institution, moving his studio to Malta for his first European solo exhibition.

With 30 works created specifically for this exhibition in Malta, Reggie Burrows Hodges: Mela marks the artist’s immersion into Maltese society and culture, with his familiar preoccupations serving to create a new narrative that will challenge the postcard image of Malta. The culminating exhibition is, as he himself states, is “a poem to Malta”.

“MICAS is now a place that generates the conditions for art to happen,” MICAS executive chairperson Phyllis Muscat said in her speech to the numerous guests present for the opening. “We invite artists not simply to hang work on our walls, but to be here – to inhabit the islands, to encounter our history, our climate, our society, witness our peculiarities… to allow Malta to enter their practice.”

Muscat toasted the continuation of the institution’s bold artistic programme, a back-to-back roster of international and Maltese artists who had found inspiration in Malta and strengthened their relationship with the museum. “With this national commitment towards the furtherance of contemporary art, MICAS has brought to Malta art that has moved through the most respected institutions in the world. We have done this not through prestige borrowing, but thanks to genuine artistic engagement.”

MICAS Artistic Director Edith Devaney said Hodges made his first trip to Malta in 2024 when he determined to relocate his studio with the intention of producing an entirely new body of work inspired by the islands. “The exhibition has a number of separate groupings and series running through it. Hodges’s long running Labor series, which explores and celebrates the activity of productive work often by those who ultimately benefit least from it, undergoes a Maltese perspective. His signature figures appear as a shadow, formed out of the negative space created by its environment, ensuring it is deeply connected to the situation it is presented in.”

With Hodges’s deep engagement with image-making in a high contrast of light and dark, it is immediately apparent that his work is also an homage to the master of Baroque and the way light can be rendered. “Perhaps the most important encounter for Hodges came within the first few days of his arrival in Malta when he visited St John’s co-Cathedral to see the large Caravaggio painting of the Beheading.”

In the widely used Maltese discourse marker “mela”, Hodges observed that this word often precedes the expression of a thought. In this exhibition, Hodges brings his practice into fresh dialogue with the Maltese context, with subjects that include the rugged coastline and surrounding Mediterranean sea, the built environment and the forms of labour that sustain it.

The force of community is keenly apparent in Hodges’s broader investigation of human dignity and endurance. “Everything I am engaged in, is in some way trying to reflect a spirit of place, time, and the people whom I have been incredibly fortunate to come into contact with… I understood clearly that there was a responsibility to really put my back into this and offer the best I have.”