An upcoming solo exhibition by Nicole Debono
Curated by Rachelle Bezzina

Malta Society of Arts (MSA)
12 March – 16 April 2026

Opening night: 12 March, 18:30

This exhibition brings together a new body of paintings by Nicole Debono that explore the instability of memory, the politics of domestic space, and the tension between intimacy and fabrication.

At first glance, the works appear familiar: interior scenes, fragments of the body, gestures suspended in quiet rooms. Then, the domestic becomes charged, unsettled, and slightly uncanny.

Central to the exhibition is the idea of a room of one’s own, not simply as a private interior, but as a condition for artistic agency. Borrowing from Virginia Woolf’s argument that creative work requires material and spatial independence, Debono treats the painted room as something actively produced rather than passively remembered. The act of painting becomes an act of claiming space: deciding what enters the image, what is withheld, and how the viewer is positioned within it. In this sense, the room is not only subject matter but a declaration of autonomy. It asks who is permitted privacy, time, and authority to construct meaning, and what it means for an artist to build that space through her own terms.

Debono does not paint rooms as they were. The room is assembled through gesture and restraint. Through careful omission, cropping, and staging, the works create spaces where certainty dissolves, and recollection becomes active. Memory is displaced from the logic of the archive and (re)configured as (re)construction.

Drawing reflections on dwelling, gaze, and interiority, the exhibition considers how space shapes us, and how visions, in turn, shape our psychic landscape.