The newly launched gallery located on Manuel Dimech Street is hosting the works of Maltese artists Anton Grech and Joyce Camilleri. Their oeuvre explores the contradictory connection between life and death; the notion of destruction as a natural consequence of creation itself.

Grech and Camilleri’s works are imbued with narratives of violence and conflict followed by a sense of awe and emptiness. Intertwining divine and human passions blur the boundaries between animal and human states of being, leaving behind a raw sense of void and a deafening silence.

Grech's small-scale sculptures, in stoneware, porcelain and cast concrete, are preambles to larger pieces, allegories of known organic forms that verge on the abstract. Ares, the Greek god of war and destruction is Grech's portrayal of the Greek god as an undefined being, frozen in cast concrete.

Camilleri's most recent work, Scoria, is an elegy to what remains post-apocalypse. It embodies her repetitive and controlled process of application and removal of material, condensing matter to its essence. According to Camilleri, this piece represents what remains and survives.

The newly-opened gallery in Sliema

In the past two decades, Grech’s sculptural work was predominantly in cast concrete (Argos, Cottonera Waterfront, 2007), however, his more recent creations are characterised by polychromatic ceramic pieces that Grech defines as an extension of his paintings; ‘chromatic spatial bodies’ that pay tribute to his mentor, the German painter, Gotthard Graubner. Grech explores the alchemy of vitreous glazes and pigments. This exploration of materials is evident in his L-annimal Series and the Seven Sisters Series.

Camilleri’s practice also involves experimental printmaking processes, pushed to the verge of the painting realm such as the Spatia Series that was initially exhibited in Berlin in 2020. Moirai is an abstract interpretation of the Sisters of Fate – Clotho, Lachelis, and Atropos – who collectively weave the threads of destiny from birth to death. Camilleri builds layers of tones, alternating between velvety blackness and a cold, bluish-white light, stained symbolically with red ochre scars. Camilleri's playful approach to materials and controlled sensitivity to colour witness her concern with capturing infinite space and depth illusions.

This exhibition at Jo Borg Gallery shows two artists whose work invites us to explore the interplay between matter, materiality and artistic intention and contemplate the hidden truths within their work.

The gallery is open to the public until January 2024, at 281a, Manuel Dimech Street, Sliema. Opening hours are on Wednesdays between 4pm and 7pm and by appointment via info@joborggallery.com.