Anna Calleja Malta, b. 1997
-
The Pain is Normal Don't Worry, 2024
Anna Calleja (b.1997) is a Maltese artist. Calleja’s work draws from her personal experience a vision of a world suspended between uncertainty, longing and the distance of memory. Her interest lies in dualities; the tension and dissonance between comfort and melancholy, isolation and connection, love and grief. Calleja’s painting technique is reflective of this in its reliance on a tentative balance between order and disorder in the paint surface.
The images begin from her personal archive; both real and constructed, cataloguing places held as home for a moment. Within her paintings, she connects to the current of art history via a dialog with what came before; she transforms recurring archetypes, catholic and patriarchal motifs within the language of figurative painting and employs them in an analysis of the present.