Acclaimed American poet Maya Angelou once said: “I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver”. The Karl Vella Foundation was set up in May 2014 after the death of Labour MP Karl Vella who, through his philanthropy and sheer dedication, had helped innumerable people in times of emotional and physical hardship. His legacy lives on through the foundation that bears his name. Its mission statement is “to provide educational and psychological support to children in families disrupted by illness”.

Boat – Marsascala by Andrew Borg

Former President Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca kindly granted a site within the premises of the Kitchen Garden, Attard, to serve as the foundation’s headquarters. This is now known as the KVF Centre and has been in operation since October 2015.

A number of volunteers from different backgrounds and walks of life offer their services to the foundation. However, donations, sponsorships and fundraising activities are essential for the KVF to continue to function and to offer its sterling aid to young children and adolescents.

Patrick Galea, curator of the Karl Vella Foundation Collective Exhibition, is one of its volunteers. His proven pedigree as a curator of Maltese art exhibitions came in handy. He admirably took it upon himself to organise a collective exhibition of Maltese contemporary art as a fundraising event. However, he wouldn’t have succeeded without the help of members of the KVF committee and the companies who kindly accepted to sponsor the event. The proceeds from the sales of the artworks will go to the foundation.

The artists who donated works for the exhibition are among the foremost and most active on the Maltese contemporary scene. The only exception is the late Gabriel Caruana (1929-2018), undisputedly the artist who almost singlehandedly established Maltese ceramics as an art-form in its own right. The magnificent round wall-hanging ceramic Abstract demonstrates the master’s profound knowledge of the medium as well as his dexterity in handling glazes. He was and, posthumously, is still a mentor for most of those Maltese contemporary artists who have become established ceramists in their own right. Mario Sammut is one of them.

Sammut’s concern with identity and community is evident in Lovers. There is a comfort in intimacy and the strength in togetherness. The featureless faces add a genderless dimension to the relationship portrayed in this piece.

Valley by Debbie Bonello

The lack of defined physiognomy ironically provides the couple with a strong sense of character and identity. However, the union of two individuals is not without struggle. The scratches on the sculpture’s surface are like stigmata that are part and parcel of any emotional relationship.

Victor Agius is renowned for his versatility in medium, concept and execution. His preoccupation with the ecological and archaeological fabric of the Maltese archipelago is a seminal theme in his output. His rough, earthy sculptures evoke the tangible harshness of the early ceramic work of Lucio Fontana in which chance and accident are major players. His sculpture Terrae is a moment of birth, a moment of chance and accident, an eruption of magma from a pregnant Mother Earth.

Contemporary Maltese landscape art is currently going from strength to strength with a number of artists who are almost exclusively devoted to the genre. Andrew Borg and Debbie Bonello are two of the artists who have joined forces by regularly painting en plein air. This is ideal, as knowledge, technique and solutions to pictorial problems are shared in a selfless spirit of participation.

Borg’s signature Rothko-like horizontal division of pictorial space consists of a quasi-abstract foreground and a receding background. The latter usually defines and roots his landscape to definite geographical locations, something that is absent in the painting on show. However, its title Boat – Marsascala gives the game away. In this work, Borg has opted for a vertical division of space.

Għargħur – by Richard Saliba

The razor-sharp boat slices through the foreshortened composition. The trail on the sandy shore adds to its mystery as one can only guess what implements and what manpower were used to manoeuvre the overpowering vessel towards the sea. The lack of human presence augments the desolate feeling. The blurred anonymity of the hilly landscape in the background deprives the viewer of the comfort of recognising a familiar geographical location, although its title is self explanatory. Borg successfully transmitted a sense of existential angst in a work ironically devoid of humanity.

Bonello shoves us headlong into an all-enveloping experience of a Maurice de Vlaminck-like wintry landscape in which a heavily leaden sky menaces to unleash the mother of all downpours.Valley’s dark, wet foreground is a treacherous abstract mass that can hide many a pitfall for the foolhardy wayfarer. However, delivery to safety can be glimpsed in the background as the valley recedes to a trail that leads out of its depth.

The artists who donated works for exhibition are among the foremost and most active on the Maltese contemporary scene

Valley is a very powerful and symbolically poignant work. The lack of human activity somehow makes the viewer the only human eyewitness to a primordial upheaval of the heavens in all its fury. There is almost nowhere to run to hide from it all. Nature is an unforgiving adversary at times like these.

Richard Saliba is a veteran landscape artist who is a mentor to the younger generation, including both Borg and Bonello. His landscape in this exhibition, Għargħur, exudes serenity and peace. The misty Għargħur church and the path of farmhouses are idyllic and demonstrate a nostalgic thirst for a simple, arcadian past.

Mother Earth yields golden wheat ripe for harvest. It is ready to be ground into flour to make bread. One is reminded of Italian artist Mario Schifano’s famous Campi di Pane, landscapes in which the only identifying features are the sheaves of wheat which was the staple diet of the masses.

However, in Saliba’s Għargħur the wheat is crushed into flour inside the farmhouses. Water is added to the flour, kneaded into sourdough and baked. Some of the flour is used to prepare the thin wafers that is transubstantiated into the Body of Christ during Mass.

Schifano, a communist at heart, epitomised wheat sheaves as “fields of bread” to feed the proletariat, thereby completing a cycle of life. For Saliba, the cycle completes itself through a belief in the Church and God. There is the entreaty for spiritual relief while consuming the daily bread and in swallowing the host of the Eucharist.

Nude by Patrick Dalli

Streetscapes are a recurrent theme in Madeleine Gera’s oeuvre. Gera highlights idiosyncrasies in everyday life as sociological comments. She gives dignity to seemingly unimportant events and focuses on details of the story rather than its totality. Valletta Showers narrates an episode, an instant, in the story of an anonymous man; a story in which rain is pouring down and the umbrella is open to protect the anonymous man from the downpour.

The instant portrayed is a cliff hanger, as one would expect further information for the story to resolve itself. This is a task that Gera leaves to the viewer. One is casually reminded of the late George Fenech’s studies of Mellieħa’s everyday life. However, Gera’s perspective is more strictly focused as she diagnoses and studies the fragment instead of the bigger picture in a way that is slightly reminiscent of American photographer Philip-Lorca di Corcia’s informal shots of street life.

Many a time the work of Patrick Dalli has been compared with that of British artist Lucian Freud. The solidity and carnality of the female models in Dalli’s oeuvre is similar to that of Freud. However, the late British artist was primarily interested in the discomfort caused to his models of both genders as they held uncomfortable, undignified and unnatural poses for long instances. His famous nudes appear to be case studies of the particular model’s mental state in vulnerable circumstances.

Terrae by Victor Agius

Dalli uses exclusively female models to execute his nudes. This might be an indication of the Maltese artist’s preoccupation with the topography and morphology of the female body. One can assume, maybe rather simplistically, that there is an erotic factor to Dalli’s nudes compared to a sadistic one in Freud’s nudes.

Dalli’s contribution to this exhibition is Nude, a study that lacks the fleshiness of his finished oil paintings. Nude captures the frailness of femininity in the complacency of the model. There is a relaxed freshness in this work that demonstrates the maturity of the artist and an ease in execution.

A young but very valid contributor to the Maltese contemporary art scene is Patricia (Pats) Lynne Spiteri. Breathe Me is an imperative, a command imploring us to assimilate the ghostly visage through respiration. It replaces the oxygen as it flows through our air passages, thereafter into our bloodstream, and it eventually becomes part of us. It can be interpreted as a desire by the artist to be fully understood at all costs by surrendering her identity through assimilation of some sort.

Spiteri’s task can perhaps be described in German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s words: “It seems as though the goal of my work has always been to dissolve my-self completely into the sensations of the surroundings in order to then integrate this into a coherent painterly form”.

The 21 artists who agreed to participate in the KVF collective exhibition should be lauded for their generosity. Galea’s efforts would have been in vain without their kind donations of paintings and sculptures. The Centre, Tigné Point, Sliema, is hosting this charitable event at its premises. It is now up to the art-loving public to ensure its success in more ways than one.

Curator Patrick Galea would like to thank all the participating artists – Alfred Camilleri, Andrew Borg, Anna Galea, Anna Grima, Antoine Paul Camilleri, Damian Ebejer, Debbie Bonello, the late Gabriel Caruana, James Vella Clarke, Joe Pace Ross, Josette Fenech, Kane Cali, Kenneth Grima, Madeleine Gera, Mario Sammut, Patrick Dalli, Patricia Lynn Spiteri, Richard Saliba, Valerio Schembri and Victor Agius. Mr Galea has contributed further by donating one of his paintings. Opening times are 10am to 6pm on weekdays and 10am to 1pm on Saturdays until April 14.