Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci
My Mellieħa Works
With introduction by Nikki Petroni
Horizons, 2023
My Mellieħa Works explores a set of artworks created by Prof. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci which engage with central aesthetic themes, amongst them reality and illusion, materiality-faktura, memory, and dialectics. The works included in this publication, measuring 120 x 240cm and created between 1990 and 2010, are a testament to personal relationships, transtemporal artistic conversations, abodes resided in and subsequently uninhabited, and, most strongly, manifest an accumulation of memories and reflections. These artworks are all fragments of Schembri Bonaci’s experiences that present an incomplete history of his life.
A number of these works confront Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, mirroring and inverting paintings of the Italian master such as The Card Players and The Musicians. Schembri Bonaci also entered into dialogue with the dance of folly from Francisco Goya’s Los Disparates series, responding with white ambiguity. The Doors and the Horizon series convey memories of the artist’s life, from Moscow, Milan, Paris, Moret-sur-Loing, and even as far as the aboriginal Northern Territory of Australia.
The publication includes full-colour reproductions of the artworks as well as an introduction by Nikki Petroni.
To acquire a copy of My Mellieħa Works, please send an email to Prof. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci or Nikki Petroni.