MATTHEW ATTARD

Malta, 1987



 

 

Opening 15 November 2025 at 12:00 noon
15 November 2025 - 15 January 2026
Tuesday - Saturday 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm
GMR, Giudecca 800 Q, Venice

The Michela Rizzo Gallery is pleased to present Boulder, the group exhibition that will conclude the exhibition series at the former brewery site. The exhibition, which will open on Saturday 15 November 2025 at 12:00, will feature a dialogue between the work of Hamish Fulton and that of Matthew Attard, Ivan Barlafante, Michael Höpfner, Francesco Jodice, Ryts Monet, Maurizio Pellegrin, Cesare Pietroiusti, David Rickard, Antonio Rovaldi, Mariateresa Sartori, Claudio Tesser and Silvano Tessarollo.

Boulders is inspired by the work Boulder by Hamish Fulton, a British artist who has made walking an artistic language and an act of awareness. Based on direct experience of the landscape and a radical conception of the relationship between art and nature, Fulton's work becomes the starting point for a choral and intergenerational dialogue around the symbol of the boulder, an emblem of strength, permanence and memory of the landscape.

Within this horizon, the artists in the exhibition are arranged according to their varying degrees of proximity to Fulton's thinking. Michael Höpfner and Antonio Rovaldi share his experiential and meditative approach more directly: both investigate walking as a means of knowledge and immersion in the landscape, restoring its physical and inner dimensions through drawings, photographs and installations.

More lateral but deeply akin in poetic tension are Mariateresa Sartori, Matthew Attard and Ivan Barlafante, who translate their relationship with nature into languages of perception and thought. Sartori presents a large installation created using the frottage technique, dedicated to the materials of stones and sand, accompanied by a book that intertwines artistic vision and scientific observation. Attard, through drawing and the use of a pen plotter, transforms three-dimensional scans of boulders into graphic tracings that blend digital precision and manual intervention, exploring the limits of perception and image.

Around these nuclei are gathered artists who, while starting from different languages and perspectives, broaden the reflection on the link between man, nature and space. David Rickard explores the material and perceptual relationships between architecture and the environment; Ryts Monet, Maurizio Pellegrin, Cesare Pietroiusti and Francesco Jodice offer conceptual and narrative visions that open up the theme of landscape to new cultural and social geographies. In particular, Jodice presents a large-scale work from the WEST project, a journey through cities born during the gold rush and now abandoned, in which the landscape becomes an archive of utopias and failures.

Silvano Tessarollo and Claudio Tesser present works in which nature reveals itself in its fragile concreteness, between memory, time and transformation. The exhibition will centre on two wall paintings by Hamish Fulton, Glacial Boulder and Revisiting The Boulders, which will occupy a significant part of the space, giving shape and breath to the entire project.

With Boulder, the Michela Rizzo Gallery concludes an important season of its journey on the Giudecca, entrusting the image of the boulder – solid and immobile but at the same time shaped by time – with the task of preserving the memory of a shared place and time. A landing place that is also a threshold: the last step before a new direction.

Matthew Attard (Malta, 1987) was the artist who represented the Maltese Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, with the project I WILL FOLLOW THE SHIP, commissioned by the Malta Arts Council and co-curated by Elyse Tonna and Sara Dolfi Agostini.

His artistic practice investigates images as social and cultural constructs. Matthew is deeply interested in situating his practice within the field of contemporary drawing through a multimedia approach that highlights the versatile, performative and temporal nature of drawing. His interest in understanding the gaze as a form of drawing – in its perceptive, physiological and cultural dimensions – has been central to his practice-based doctoral research at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, funded by the Malta Arts Scholarship programme.

Raised in Malta, in 2009 he moved to Venice and collaborated with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the United States Pavilion at the 2009 and 2011 Venice Art Biennale. He later returned to Malta, where in 2018 he obtained a Master of Research at the Department of Digital Arts, University of Malta. He exhibited his works for the first time in a double solo exhibition organised in 2014 at Galleria Michela Rizzo in Venice. Since then he has exhibited in Venice, Rome, Valletta, Genoa, London, Beijing and Los Angeles, among other cities.

In addition, in 2017 he was selected for the third edition of the Biennale Le Latitudini dell’Arte at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, while in 2018 he received the Under 30 Euromobil Prize at ArteFiera in Bologna. He was selected three times to exhibit in Ten Artists to Watch at LACDA (Los Angeles Centre for Digital Arts) and in 2019 he was invited to participate in Artissima Telephone at the OGR spaces in Turin. In 2021 he was selected for the Lumen Prize 2021. Rajt ma rajtx… naf li rajt is one of Matthew’s main solo exhibitions, curated by Elyse Tonna at Valletta Contemporary in 2021. In 2022 he was commissioned to create the work Here's How I Did Not See What You Wanted Me To See as part of the digital residency OPEN at Blitz in Valletta, curated by Sara Dolfi Agostini. In 2023 he held the solo exhibition Ship of Fools at Galleria Michela Rizzo in Venice.

In 2025 he presented segni di rotta at Galleria Michela Rizzo and in October 2025 inaugurated The Ship (Unseen), curated by Elyse Tonna, at the Inquisitor’s Palace in Birgu, Malta.