Homebody |
Maria Borg
Exhibition |
22 January 2021 - 21 February 2021
There is a comfort in objects; those that are familiar, those that we encounter every day. Those objects provide us with a sense of mental equilibrium, because they don’t change. Because they are part of our routine, they are us.
This exhibition focuses on painting objects. The paintings obsess over texture; the softness of the fabric and the heaviness of the body that inhabited them. They tease by evoking a presence that interacted with the subject that is no longer there. This absence lends the objects a heavy aura which suggests that they will be around for much longer than we will.
Highlights from the exhibition
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Maria Borg
Maria Borg is a visual artist working primarily in figurative oil paintings. She gives a lot of importance to the studio practice. For her, being a painter means spending a lot of time indoors, looking at things through an obsessive, almost surgical lens. She applies this obsession with texture and form onto domestic, often mundane objects.
Her work encourages people to look at these objects with a painterly eye; the shape and its irregularity, the texture, and the invitation to touch.
Maria lives and works in Malta, spreading her time between teaching at a primary level and her studio practice. Maria Borg graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine art in 2014. She has taken part in local collective exhibitions and has attended a residency in Newburgh, Scotland.
“‘Homebody’ is a series of paintings that originated during a four-month painting residency in a remote part of Scotland. Being so far away from home, alone and with a world of possibilities in my hands as regard to what to paint, I found myself looking for comfort, looking inwards. This search manifested itself in painting personal objects, then domestic objects. The objects take an identity of their own, a presence… Yet, they beg for a story, a context.” – Maria Borg
