When MICAS announced its exhibition programme for its first two years, just prior to opening in October 2024, a solo project by the Californian artist Reggie Burrows Hodges had been included as an important element within the museum’s ambitious artistic vision.

As MICAS’s Artistic Director, Edith Devaney, says, nobody could have imagined how ambitious and transformative hosting one artist for an exhibition would be.

Already an artist working at the height of his powers and emerging from the artistic tradition of American painting, Reggie Burrows Hodges’s engagement reached another level when he travelled to Malta in 2024 with the intention of establishing a studio and producing a body of work specifically for this exhibition.

Developed during his extended stay in Malta, 'Reggie Burrows Hodges: Mela' brings together 30 paintings, his largest canvases to date, all created on the island, installed across MICAS’s striking, multi-level galleries.

With Malta being often distilled into a familiar visual shorthand of weathered limestone, corbelled stone walls, and sunlit spectacles, Malta’s postcard image has received a different treatment at the hands of Reggie Burrows Hodges. Visitors to MICAS will immediately absorb his recognisable signature: figures slowly emerging from deep black backgrounds, their forms and gestures gradually coming into focus within richly layered, textured scenes.

'Hodges’s body of work is deeply imbued with his experience and discovery of Malta – its history, culture, landscape, and people – and it was created for MICAS, and in many ways, for all its visitors,' Edith Devaney says.

During his time here, Reggie immersed himself in everyday life in Malta. He observed the steady rhythm of construction sites, but also moments of pause and community – people swimming along the Sliema coast, or gathering for waterpolo matches in seaside towns. These lived experiences filter into the work, resulting in paintings that feel both deeply personal and closely tied to Malta’s evolving identity.

At the heart of the artist’s work on Malta are his familiar themes of memory and labour – how work leaves its mark on both the body and the landscape, and how personal and collective histories are carried forward. In Malta, these themes take on a distinct character, for audiences will behold the contrast between the island’s natural coastline and the constant movement of construction.

'And it is precisely this beauty – the application of pigment, the sensitivity of his palette, and the fearless scale of the paintings – that envelops the viewer both visually and emotionally,' Edith adds.

The exhibition’s title, 'Mela', comes from one of the Maltese language’s most familiar expressions. Used in many different ways depending on tone and context, for Hodges the word appears to carry a sense of transition, something about to be said. To the artist this came to represent a moment of possibility, a point 'where meaning is still forming'. In it, Reggie seems to locate a very particular aspect of Malteseness – a sense of openness, the friendship he experienced here in Malta.

One of the highlights of 'Reggie Burrows Hodges: Mela' is a large-scale, site-specific painting inspired by the artist’s encounter with The Beheading of St John the Baptist by Caravaggio, a masterpiece closely linked to Malta’s cultural heritage. The artist reimagines the drama and scale of the original, translating it into his own contemporary visual language and creating a powerful dialogue between past and present.

The experience at MICAS goes beyond painting. Within the museum’s external barrel-vaulted spaces, Hodges also presents a sound installation inspired by ancient musical traditions connected to Malta and Gozo’s Neolithic sites. This immersive element adds another layer to the exhibition, encouraging visitors to engage not just visually, but through sound and space.

MICAS executive chairperson Phyllis Muscat says that with Reggie’s first solo European exhibition taking place here in Malta, MICAS is today a place that generates the conditions for art to happen, both for international artists as well as for the Maltese artists for whom this platform also exists.

'We have invited 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. And to have Reggie spend time in Malta is precisely the kind of encounter MICAS was designed to make possible. For this produces a record – a body of evidence that Malta is a site of genuine creative relevance on the international contemporary art map.'

'Reggie Burrows Hodges: Mela' will be running from 9th May to 30th August 2026 at MICAS, Floriana. 

Will you be attending this solo exhibition?