MARIO ABELA

Childhood’s End - Oil on canvas - 2024/25

This exhibition will mark the unveiling of ‘Childhood’s End’; an oil painting Mario Abela has carried with him throughout the year, evolving slowly in gesture and intention. Emerging from his ongoing dialogue with Fra Angelico’s Madonna and Child and The Annunciation, the work continues Abela’s inquiry into how sacred iconography survives in a secular age. In a world increasingly detached from tenderness, reverence, and the interior space of contemplation, these echoes of early devotional imagery become a ground on which to question what remains sacred today.

Accompanying the central painting will be a constellation of smaller canvases and works on paper — the quiet traces of a process unfolding over time. These pieces function almost as marginalia: fragments of thought, sudden intuitions, and emotional residues that reveal the internal architecture of the larger work. Through them, the exhibition will not simply present an artwork, but chart a reflection on loss, change, and the passage of time.

At its core, Childhood’s End offers a meditation on a dual rupture: the natural dissolution of childhood as time advances, and the violent erasure of childhood when it is stolen — through war, displacement, mishap, or long before life is allowed to begin. The work asks what it means for innocence to vanish, not as a gentle transition, but as an interruption imposed by the world. In doing so, the exhibition becomes an invitation to consider how societies repeatedly reenact this loss and how fragile the idea of childhood truly is.

This exhibition also marks a deeply personal threshold for the artist. It arrives ten years after Abela’s first thematic solo show — and ten years after the birth of his son. As his child enters a new decade, stepping slowly beyond the realm of childhood, Abela confronts the strange symmetry between artistic time and lived time. The exhibition becomes not only a reflection on innocence lost, but a meditation on how a decade shapes a life, how a child grows, and how an artist evolves. 

PARADISO - A series of five oil paintings on canvas - 2025

That Little Space You Left - A series of five, mixed media on paper, mounted on canvas - 2025

Study drawings for Childhood’s End and The Annunciation of Collapse