Reggie Burrows Hodges: Mela is the summer’s Top 5 exhibition – Frieze, Artsy
MICAS attracts global art world attention with Californian artist’s first European solo exhibition Reggie Burrows Hodges: Mela
Top accolades from international contemporary art magazine Frieze, as well as Arsty, the world’s largest online art marketplace, have confirmed Reggie Burrows Hodges: Mela as one of Europe’s top five art exhibitions this season.
The listing is yet another confirmation for the Malta International Contemporary Art Space’s artistic programme, which this summer hosted the first European solo exhibition ever for the Californian artist Reggie Burrows Hodges.
The authoritative Frieze listed the exhibition as one of August’s must-sees for the way Hodges’ monumental as well as small-scale works appear to float intuitively amongst the vast galleries, unfolding across four floors of MICAS’s historic limestone, glass and steel.
“The exhibition’s hang feels bold yet organic: works like Mammajamma (all works 2025)are visible from all four floors, creating sightlines that evoke the scale of a stadium, while others, such as Les Capotées, reveal themselves gradually,” writes art historian Melissa Baksh – her full review describes Hodges as having created “worlds within worlds in which faceless figures emerge from the darkness only to dissolve back into it, like forms glimpsed beneath the surface of an oil-like sea. His complex, incandescent paintings ask us to linger in these moments of suspension, in which the everyday is rendered timeless. What emerges is a living meditation on Malta’s spirit: distinct, enduring and wrought by the tide.”
Listed alongside Barcelona’s Casa Battló and Marseille’s Vielle Charité, Artsy said MICAS was “a place not to miss”, situated as it within the Siculo-Arabic fusion of Malta’s captivating light.
“From Marseille, France, to the Greek islands, some of the most compelling shows of the year are taking place in Mediterranean destinations,” Artsy says in listing Malta as an essential destination for art lovers in the summer.
“What’s inside this summer earns the journey twice over: ‘Mela’, American artist Reggie Burrows Hodges’s first European solo show. The survey fills all four gallery floors with 30 new paintings made after the artist relocated his studio to Malta for two years, absorbing the island’s coastline, its construction workers, and its quality of light.
“The centerpiece is a monumental canvas painted in direct response to Caravaggio’s Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (1608), which hangs across the harbour in St. John’s Co-Cathedral, and is a must-see once there.”
