Currently exhibiting at the Venice Biennale 2026.
About Mixa Painting
Practice
The work begins long before the painting.
It begins with earth gathered by hand, with stone reduced to pigment, with ash, clay, minerals and plant matter that carry their own histories. I make my own paints because I want the material itself to speak. It arrives imperfect, unpredictable and alive, bringing with it traces of place, time and transformation.
I do not think of nature as a subject to be represented. I work with it.
Each painting becomes a conversation between what I can control and what I cannot: the behaviour of minerals, the memory held within organic matter, the slow accumulation of layers that record both intention and chance.
I am drawn to surfaces that ask to be read rather than simply seen. Erosion, fragility and imperfection are not effects but collaborators. They remind us that nothing is fixed; everything is in the process of becoming.
Based in Malta, my practice explores how material can hold memory, and how painting can become a place where human experience and the natural world briefly meet.
In 2026 my work was presented in Personal Structures, organised by the European Cultural Centre (ECC) at Palazzo Mora during the Venice Biennale.
Artist Statement
Before there is a painting, there is a walk.
I gather earth, stone, ash and plant matter, not because they represent the landscape, but because they are the landscape. They have already lived a life before they enter the studio. I grind them, sift them, mix them with water and binder. Slowly, they become colour, though they never entirely leave behind what they once were.
I have come to understand painting as a conversation rather than an act of control. The materials insist on their own nature. Some resist. Some dissolve. Some crack as they dry. I no longer see these moments as imperfections but as a record of collaboration. The work is made as much by the behaviour of the materials as by my hand.
The surface becomes a place where time gathers. Layers settle over one another like sediment, holding traces of decisions, interruptions and chance. I return to them repeatedly, allowing the paintings to evolve at their own pace. They ask for patience. They ask to be looked at slowly.
I am interested in what remains when certainty falls away: the weight of a stone reduced to pigment, the memory carried by a handful of soil, the quiet evidence that every material has its own history.
These are not stories I impose upon the work. They are stories the materials already contain.
I do not think of nature as something outside ourselves.
We move through it, carry it with us, and eventually return to it. My paintings are an attempt to make that relationship visible—not by depicting the world, but by allowing fragments of it to become the work itself.