GOXWA

Ġoxwa began painting at a very young age in her native land of Malta and eventually enrolled at the Saint Martin School of Art in London. Years later, she moved to Boston and attended Emerson College for film studies. Since her inaugural solo exhibition in 1993, she has maintained an extensive international exhibition circuit, frequently showing in Paris, New York, Strasbourg, and San Francisco. Ġoxwa currently resides in Paris, and her exhibitions continue to draw countless admirers, collectors, and critical accolades.

The artist defies art historical categorization, drawing upon a rich and varied trove of traditions without restricting herself to any one established modus operandi. Working with a palette knife in oil paint and beeswax on canvas, she pays tribute to centuries-old methods of mural painting. Just as the buon fresco technique demands tremendous skill, speed, and foresight in navigating the plaster’s curing, the rapid dry time of Ġoxwa’s signature medium necessitates a certain controlled urgency of execution. A discerning eye for color—resulting in a largely tonal palette punctuated by judicious inclusions of jewel tones—marries elegant contour and skilled spontaneity on the seductively tactile surface of Ġoxwa’s works.

The indefinable poignancy of her imagery betrays the layers of lived experience saturating the work. Oblique nods to classical antiquity evoke distant temporal landscapes, weaving glimmering strands of the past into a vibrant tapestry of contemporary feeling. A kind of positive ahistoricism emerges, reflecting the artist’s childhood in a Mediterranean land steeped in memory and multiplicity.

Thousands of years ago, Minoan mural painters on the island of Crete employed their fresco method to capture the unique frequency of their reality, adorning the walls of their palaces with brilliantly colored dolphins, priestesses, and toreadors. So too does Ġoxwa utilize her technique in direct response to her twenty-first- century world: a post-postmodern society seeking the sincerity of human emotion and the earnestness of mystery as antidotes for apathy and irony. Throughout her sinuous exploration of content, Ġoxwa’s knack for generating genuine intrigue remains a constant, artfully ensnaring the imagination and transporting the viewer to a timeless world of visual splendor.