Lyndsey Ingram is proud to present a solo exhibition by Maltese artist Anna Calleja titled The air is thick with dust and dawn. The exhibition brings together small-scale paintings on panel and paper that operate like visual notations: tender, diaristic, and rich with references. Each image emerges from her ongoing personal archive, real and imagined. Calleja positions the female experience at the centre, reframing narrative tropes and archetypes from the history of figurative painting. Made over the past year, each image is rooted in a place that Calleja has inhabited, even briefly, during an extended period of great change. The title reflects this time of transition - an unsettled atmosphere, the air thick with dust, but also shot through with possibility.
These paintings are quiet revelations: suspending the accelerated pace of the outside and online world. Calleja is from Malta, where in her lifetime the skyline has been changed beyond recognition. Each horizon and sunset is laden with the implication of ongoing loss, as each day brings a new crane and a new building rising. Against this fast-moving backdrop, her paintings hold on to time, resisting change for a moment longer, meditating on and grieving the present.
Her process is meticulous and compulsive; working alla prima, Calleja pushes and pulls paint across smoothly sanded panels. Because the paint is applied in one thin layer, it often forces her to work through the night in a marathon sprint against the rapidly drying paint. The result is a uniquely luminous surface that achieves a delicately translucent balance between paint and the ground beneath.
The painting titles pull from Calleja’s journaling practice and cite writers such as Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood and Sappho, echoing her interest in how language animates images. The air is thick with dust and dawn bridges opposing forces: tenderness and aggression, grief and fear, intimacy and uncertainty, destruction and possibility. These 19 new works capture fragments of a life lived in transition, paintings that breathe with the air of change, holding both the quiet of still rooms and the weather of storms outside.
These paintings are quiet revelations: suspending the accelerated pace of the outside and online world. Calleja is from Malta, where in her lifetime the skyline has been changed beyond recognition. Each horizon and sunset is laden with the implication of ongoing loss, as each day brings a new crane and a new building rising. Against this fast-moving backdrop, her paintings hold on to time, resisting change for a moment longer, meditating on and grieving the present.
Her process is meticulous and compulsive; working alla prima, Calleja pushes and pulls paint across smoothly sanded panels. Because the paint is applied in one thin layer, it often forces her to work through the night in a marathon sprint against the rapidly drying paint. The result is a uniquely luminous surface that achieves a delicately translucent balance between paint and the ground beneath.
The painting titles pull from Calleja’s journaling practice and cite writers such as Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood and Sappho, echoing her interest in how language animates images. The air is thick with dust and dawn bridges opposing forces: tenderness and aggression, grief and fear, intimacy and uncertainty, destruction and possibility. These 19 new works capture fragments of a life lived in transition, paintings that breathe with the air of change, holding both the quiet of still rooms and the weather of storms outside.
