Retrospective: Reluctant Modernist Ġużeppi Briffa

Christian Attard (Curator)

Christian Attard lectures in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Malta and at the Malta School of Art. His research interests encompass the iconographies of plague and death, as well as the art of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on Visual Culture methodologies.

Among Attard’s recent projects is his research on, and conservation coordination of, the cultic seventeenth-century crucifix popularly known as Ta’ Ġieżu, attributed to Frate Innocenzo da Petralia. His publications include The Art of Dying Well: Visual Culture in Times of Piety and Plague in Malta, 1675–1814, alongside studies on the work of Maltese contemporary artists, Antoine Camilleri and Joseph L. Mallia.

Born in 1901, Ġużeppi Briffa was already well into his sixties when Malta began cautiously opening itself to new intellectual and cultural currents, particularly in the wake of Malta’s 1964 Independence and the reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council, concluded in 1965. These shifts reshaped visual culture and audience expectation surrounding artistic expression, just as they transformed political and religious structures. Within this context, Briffa emerged as a pivotal mediating figure. He was neither an avant-garde radical nor an academic traditionalist. Rather, he functioned as a bridge between an inherited visual language and the possibility of innovation. His work can thus be understood as occupying a space of negotiation, revealing a form of modernism that is measured and introspective, yet culturally and popularly attuned.

The thesis proposed by this exhibition suggests that Briffa’s work occupies a complex mediating position, straddling an intersection that remains, on the one hand, shaped by a late nineteenth-century demand for clarity and readability, and on the other, by an emerging desire to question the status quo and challenge facile visual conventions.