Malta International Contemporary Art Space (MICAS) presents a major solo exhibition by African-American painter Reggie Burrows Hodges, marking the artist’s first exhibition in Europe.
Entitled Mela, it brings together an entirely new body of work created during Hodges’ move to Malta in 2024, inspired by his experiences on the island and engaging with its culture and history. Spanning over 30 new paintings across the museum’s four main gallery floors, including the largest canvases of his career, Mela represents Hodges’ most ambitious body of work to date.
Hodges (b. 1965, Compton, California) is an internationally acclaimed artist known for his use of painting as a powerful form of visual storytelling and metaphor. Mela – a widely used Maltese word meaning ‘so’ or ‘well,’ which Hodges observed often precedes the expression of a thought or idea – extends his ongoing exploration of identity, memory, labour and collective experience, bringing his practice into fresh dialogue with the Maltese context. The paintings were developed during the artist’s extended stay on the island, following the relocation of his studio to Valletta, and are shaped by his immersion in Malta’s social, historical and geographic landscape. From the rugged coastline and women’s bathing traditions to scenes of agricultural and physical labour, these works embed local Maltese histories within Hodges’ broader investigation of human dignity and endurance.
The works in Mela exemplify Hodges’ distinctive painterly language: originally trained in theatre and film, his work combines strong narrative charge with dramatic composition. Beginning with a layer of black paint, Hodges allows figures and environments to emerge through negative space, shifting emphasis away from descriptive realism toward atmosphere, gesture and psychological presence. Faces and bodies are often deliberately indeterminate, reflecting the artist’s interest in ambiguity, the evolving relationship between people and their surroundings, and the nature of memory. This approach connects Mela to Hodges’ wider practice, including his acclaimed paintings rooted in recollections of growing up in Compton, which foreground Black community and resilience, and draw inspiration from influences like David Driskell, Alex Katz and Milton Avery.
Among the exhibition’s key works is a monumental painting created at the exact scale of Caravaggio’s The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, which was painted in Malta during Caravaggio’s exile and remains the artist’s largest and only signed work.
Complementing these paintings is a group of seascapes inspired by Malta’s surrounding waters and by Hodges’ ongoing interest in the sea as a space of movement, migration and exchange.
As a coda to the main gallery exhibition, Hodges has programmed the external vault with a related music-based work inspired by accounts of Neolithic music from past civilisations across Malta and Gozo. Drawing on recordings from these ancient sites, Hodges has developed a musical framework that transforms this material into a sensory experience.
