Anna Calleja works across painting, printmaking, and installation. Her practice is research-led and rooted in personal and inherited archives, focusing on matriarchal memory and female archetypes as a way to examine faith, shame, desire, and self-narration. The images begin from a personal archive, both real and constructed, cataloguing places held as home for a moment. Calleja presents a world suspended between uncertainty, longing, and the distance of memory. Her work positions the female experience at the centre, reframing narrative tropes from the history of figurative painting. In 2024, Calleja presented Mothertongues alongside Ħlas at the inaugural Malta Biennale. The installation combined painting, family photographs, letters, objects, and personal belongings, drawing on Virginia Woolf’s concept of “thinking back through our mothers” to situate a feminist counter-narrative within the Grand Master’s Palace in Valletta, a site historically tied to male authority and colonial power. This research continues to inform her painting practice, most recently in A Not Admitting to the Wound – The Pain is Normal, Don’t Worry (2024) shown in Last Night I dreamt of Manderley, an exhibition curated by Daniel Malarkey at Alison Jacques in 2025. Calleja’s process is meticulous and compulsive; working alla prima, pushing and pulling 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. Titles are drawn from Calleja’s journaling practice and reference writers including Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, and Sappho, reflecting an ongoing interest in how language structures images and meaning. Calleja studied Fine Art at Falmouth University and has since exhibited internationally in London, Paris, Berlin, New York City, Brescia Dallas, and Los Angeles. In 2022, she was awarded the Premju għall-Arti for Best Young Artist by Arts Council Malta. In 2024, she participated in the inaugural Malta Biennale, exhibiting an installation of archival material that explored generations of womanhood and postcolonial identity across three generations of her family. That same year, she was selected by Katy Hessel for The Great Women Artists Residency x Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy, and held a solo exhibition at Sim Smith Gallery, London. In 2025, her work was exhibited in The air is thick with dust and dawn, a solo show at Lyndsey Ingram Gallery, Modele Vivant curated by Jack Siebert in Los Angeles and Last Night I Dreamt of Manderley curated by Daniel Malarkey at Alison Jacques. In 2026, Calleja was awarded a residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris.
