Malta International Contemporary Art Space (MICAS) presents Reggie Burrows Hodges: Mela, a major solo exhibition by the African-American painter Reggie Burrows Hodges, marking the artist’s first exhibition in Europe. Reggie Burrows Hodges: Mela brings together an entirely new body of work created during Hodges’ time in Malta in 2024, informed by his experiences on the island 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, Reggie Burrows Hodges: Mela represents the artist’s most ambitious body of work to date. The exhibition is curated by Edith Devaney, Artistic Director of MICAS, and runs from 9 May to 30 August.
Hodges (b. 1965, Compton, California) is an internationally acclaimed artist known for his formally inventive paintings, which consider fleeting, everyday moments as well as the social and historical conditions that charge them. 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 paintings developed during the artist’s extended stay on the island, which are shaped by his immersion in Malta’s social, historical and geographic landscapes. These considerations of subjects including the rugged coastline and surrounding Mediterranean sea, the built environment and the forms of labour that sustain it embed local Maltese histories within Hodges’ broader investigation of human dignity and endurance.
The works in Reggie Burrows Hodges: Mela exemplify Hodges’ distinctive painterly language, which is informed by theatre, film, art history and his own memories. Hodges begins with a black ground, his figures emerging through richly rendered environments and garments. In forgoing descriptive realism in favour of atmosphere and gesture, the artist pursues generative ambiguity, the evolving relationship between people and their surroundings, and the nature of memory. This approach connects Reggie Burrows Hodges: Mela to the artist’s 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 as an ode both formally and in scale to 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. Hodges responds to this historical precedent with a site-specific reinterpretation, filtered through his own visual language and contemporary concerns.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, Hodges returns to his long-running ‘Labor’ series, here focusing on the manual work of the labourers to construct Malta’s rapidly developing built environment. In Malta, these works resonate with the island’s architectural histories and its long relationship to land and survival.
Complementing these paintings is a group of seascapes inspired by Malta’s surrounding waters and Hodges’ longtime consideration of the complex histories and mythologies of the sea. Buoys, shorelines, bathing huts and pools recur throughout the exhibition, evoking both traditional social practices and contemporary forms of belonging.
Reflecting on the people, landscapes and layered histories that shaped the project, the artist has described Reggie Burrows Hodges: Mela as “a poem to Malta.”
As a coda to the main gallery exhibition, Hodges has programmed the external vault with a related sound installation influenced 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.
Reggie Burrows Hodges: “Without making the journey to Malta and spending time immersing myself in the culture, I wouldn’t have had a shot at its richness. That would have been a real loss – not for Malta, but for me.”
Edith Devaney, Artistic Director of MICAS and curator of the exhibition, commented: “It has been extraordinary to observe how Reggie immediately immersed himself in every aspect of Malta, allowing himself to become deeply receptive to the country and its people, and the extent to which he was able to translate these observations into a powerful and emotional body of work.”
Reggie Burrows Hodges: Mela forms part of MICAS’s wider programme exploring cross-cultural exchange between artists and Malta, examining how the island’s distinctive history and social fabric can act as a catalyst for new artistic production. Following growing international recognition of Hodges’ work, the exhibition further affirms his position as one of the most significant painters of his generation. It will be accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring a new essay by Edith Devaney.
Since opening in 2024, MICAS has presented a programme spanning major international and Maltese artists, including its inaugural solo exhibition of Joana Vasconcelos and agroup exhibition exploring the legacy of Milton Avery through the work of Henni Alftan, March Avery, Harold Ancart, Andrew Cranston, Gary Hume, Nicolas Party and Jonas Wood.
