Aldo Micallef Grimaud’s MUŻA retrospective lets Malta see itself raw

Aldo Micallef Grimaud’s first major retrospective in Malta flings open the doors of MUŻA this evening, and Valletta’s streets already feel louder. By 19:00 the museum’s sandstone steps are dotted with teenagers in hoodies scrolling through the artist’s Instagram reels, while septuagenarians in Sunday best clutch the exhibition catalogue like a prayer book. Inside, 120 works—ranging from the charcoal self-portrait he scratched out at 14 in a Birkirkara classroom to the three-metre tarpaulin splashed last winter in his Għargħur studio—trace 40 years of restless seeing.

For locals, the show is less a cultural event than a family reunion. “That’s my cousin’s ex-boyfriend,” giggles a woman pointing to a 1993 photograph of a sunburnt boy on the Sliema front. Nearby, a St Julian’s fisherman recognises the chipped azure of his old luzzu in a 2006 oil, the hull now cracked and luminous as a Byzantine icon. Micallef Grimaud has always painted Malta from the inside: not the postcard, but the peeling paint beneath. His canvases swell with the ochre of Gozo clay, the nicotine-tinged ceilings of Ħamrun bars, the bruised violet that creeps over the Grand Harbour when the fireworks end.

MUŻA’s curators have hung the chronological arc across four chambers titled Earth, Skin, Tide and Ash. The last room hits hardest: a frieze of 30 small panels recording the 2021 Ta’ Qali fire that devoured farmers’ greenhouses, painted on scorched tomato stakes salvaged from the site. Visitors fall silent here, breathing in the ghost of smoke that still lingers in Maltese throats. “I wanted the land to speak back,” the artist tells me, voice hoarse from last night’s installation. “We keep acting like spectators on this rock. We’re not. We’re its marrow.”

The timing is deliberate. The exhibition opens exactly 50 years since Malta’s first National Art Competition crowned a 19-year-old Micallef Grimaud “Most Promising Draughtsman” in 1974. Back then, modernism was a dirty word and the National Museum hung his nudes facing the wall for “public decency”. Tonight, Culture Minister Owen Bonnici praises the same paintings as “pillars of our patrimony”, proof—if any were needed—that Maltese identity is a palimpsest, not a statue.

Yet the real triumph is demographic. MUŻA has waived entry for anyone under 25 throughout the show’s three-month run, and workshops booked within hours: Gudja scouts silk-screening fishing motifs, Kirkop pensioners collaging bus tickets into harbour maps. Even the street hawkers outside have caught the bug; one is flogging €2 prints of Micallef Grimaud’s 1985 watercolour “Pastizzi Dawn” alongside the usual fridge magnets. “Business is business,” he shrugs, “but honestly, I’m proud the man’s from Naxxar, same as my nanna.”

Critics will argue that a single retrospective cannot mend the island’s frayed relationship with contemporary art—funding remains scarce, commercial galleries cluster around safe landscapes, and the Venice Biennale still feels like a distant cousin. Still, tonight feels like a hinge. When the artist’s 88-year-old father stands up during the opening speeches and sings a spontaneous għanja about brushstrokes brighter than fireworks, half the audience is crying. Outside, the city’s new pedestrian lights blink on, bathing Republic Street in the same cobalt Micallef Grimaud mixes from lapis and sea salt.

By closing time the queue still curls around Archbishop Street. Students debate which canvas best captures the smell after rain on limestone; an English tourist asks if the paintings are for sale, then stays to listen when a local explains that some things are worth more than money. The exhibition’s title, “Kif Narawk,” is pure Maltese slang: “This is how I see you.” For once, the island is looking back at itself—warts, wonder and all—and finding the reflection not just bearable, but beautiful.