A New Life Force,

Curated by Edith Devaney, Artistic Director of MICAS

10 October 2026 – 31 January 2027

Malta International Contemporary Art Space presents A New Life Force, a major new exhibition bringing together three painters each gaining international recognition: Nathanaëlle Herbelin, Kemi Onabulé and Megan Rooney.

Working across distinct visual languages shaped by diverse cultural backgrounds, the exhibition offers a compelling insight into the next generation of women artists who are redefining contemporary painting today.

Curated by Edith Devaney, Artistic Director of MICAS, the exhibition reflects the museum’s commitment to supporting artists at pivotal moments in their careers while fostering new international dialogues around modern and contemporary art. For A New Life Force, each artist has created new bodies of work informed in part by visits to Malta, drawing inspiration from the island’s culture, history and geography and grounding the exhibition within its local context.

Designed by Paris-based Cécile Degos, the exhibition unfolds across three gallery floors at MICAS, with each artist occupying their own dedicated space. The museum’s terrace-like configuration allows visitors to observe and experience both the distinctions and resonances between the artists’ works. This creates a dynamic conversation between their practices, which draw from their respective cultural heritages while connecting to historic traditions of painting.

Based in Paris, French-Israeli artist Nathanaëlle Herbelin (b.1989) is celebrated for atmospheric figuration that combines intimacy, memory and psychological depth. Drawing upon the poetic sensibility of post-impressionist artists such as Les Nabis, as well as Ferdinand Hodler and, later, Martin Wong, her paintings invite close, contemplative viewing. Their softened forms and muted palettes suggest fragments of recollection and emotional interiority, evoking experiences that are at once disturbing and wondrous.

Herbelin’s works at MICAS respond directly to the dramatic architecture of the lower-ground gallery, which is divided into two distinct spaces. In the expansive hall located 18m below the museum’s floating roof, she will present larger figurative paintings flooded with light and space; while a more intimate section will feature smaller, abstracted works. The paintings are deeply imbued with spiritual dimensions, influenced by the devotional ex-voto artefacts found in historic buildings and churches across Malta.

Occupying the central gallery space, London-based painter Kemi Onabulé (b.1995) draws upon her Greek, English and Nigerian heritage to explore humanity’s relationship with landscape, ecology and collective memory. Her paintings often depict figures inhabiting dreamlike environments poised between harmony and uncertainty, evoking both ancient histories and speculative futures.

As part of her research visits to Malta, Onabulé was struck by the island’s vitality and the visible traces of its combative past. The intensity of the landscape, flora and colour palette all informed a powerful new body of work for the exhibition, many of which mark her largest canvases to date.

Canadian artist Megan Rooney (b.1985), who lives and works in London, is known for a multidisciplinary practice encompassing painting, installation and performance. Her paintings emerge through accumulations of gesture and colour, built up and sanded back in a physically demanding process that gives her works a vivid sense of movement and intensity.

During her time in Malta, Rooney became especially attuned to the luminosity of the MICAS galleries and the island’s rich prehistoric landscape. Created specifically for the museum’s floating walls and upper galleries, and shaped by the shifting light of its colossal glass ceiling, this entirely new body of work draws on Rooney’s longstanding interest in memory, myth and the ancient world. Through layered surfaces alive with colour, atmosphere and fleeting intimations of nature, the paintings evoke interior landscapes, inviting contemplation of time, transformation and our connection to the natural environment.

Together, the three artists in A New Life Force demonstrate the enduring vitality and transformative possibilities of painting today. Through deeply personal yet resonant approaches to colour and place, memory and human experience, the exhibition offers a timely reflection on contemporary painting as a site of experimentation, emotion and renewal.

Curator Edith Devaney, Artistic Director of MICAS, commented: “All three artists demonstrate a determined focus on their singular modes of expression while maintaining a deep connection to, and engagement with, the history of art. They each share a distinct commitment to painting and to exploring the possibilities of the medium. Individually, each possesses enormous creative energy – and we look forward to seeing this unfold across the walls of MICAS.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated publication published by Skira. In addition to a short essay by Edith Devaney, it will include interviews with Herbelin, Onabulé and Rooney, conducted by Adelaide Bannerman (independent art curator), Nicolas Gausserand (Curator, Musée d’Orsay) and Professor Mark Hallett (Märit Rausing Director, Courtauld Institute of Art), respectively.