Megan Rooney: A New Life Force Group exhibition at Malta International Contemporary Art Space
Malta International Contemporary Art Space presents A New Life Force, a major new exhibition bringing together three painters each gaining international recognition: Nathanaëlle Herbelin, Kemi Onabulé and Megan Rooney. Working across distinct visual languages shaped by diverse cultural backgrounds, the exhibition offers a compelling insight into the next generation of women artists who are redefining contemporary painting today.
Curated by Edith Devaney, Artistic Director of MICAS, the exhibition reflects the museum's commitment to supporting artists at pivotal moments in their careers while fostering new international dialogues around modern and contemporary art. For A New Life Force, each artist has created new bodies of work informed in part by visits to Malta, drawing inspiration from the island's culture, history and geography and grounding the exhibition within its local context.
Designed by Paris-based Cécile Degos, the exhibition unfolds across three gallery floors at MICAS, with each artist occupying their own dedicated space. The museum’s terrace-like configuration allows visitors to observe and experience both the distinctions and resonances between the artists’ works. This creates a dynamic conversation between their practices, which draw from their respective cultural heritages while connecting to historic traditions of painting.
Canadian artist Megan Rooney (b.1985), who lives and works in London, is known for a multidisciplinary practice encompassing painting, installation and performance. Her paintings emerge through accumulations of gesture and colour, built up and sanded back in a physically demanding process that gives her works a vivid sense of movement and intensity.
During her time in Malta, Rooney became especially attuned to the luminosity of the MICAS galleries and the island’s rich prehistoric landscape. Created specifically for the museum’s floating walls and upper galleries, and shaped by the shifting light of its colossal glass ceiling, this entirely new body of work draws on Rooney’s longstanding interest in memory, myth and the ancient world. Through layered surfaces alive with colour, atmosphere and fleeting intimations of nature, the paintings evoke interior landscapes, inviting contemplation of time, transformation and our connection to the natural environment.
