Interview /Malta / Lily Agius Gallery Venice 2022
CHARLIE CAUCHI
SUPPORTING LOCAL TALENT Lily Agius established the Lily Agius Gallery in 2011 and is the founder of Artpaper. Although she has been a fixture on the Maltese art scene for over a decade, she shows no signs of slowing down. Lily talks work, art and her exciting plans for the future.
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he coastal town of Sliema is one of Malta’s busiest shopping districts. It is also home to the Lily Agius Gallery, founded in 2011 by the eponymous curator. A graduate of the History of Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan and History of Art at the University of Malta, Lily presented her first exhibition in 2004 with the British photographer Charlie Roff. In the early years of her career, she found a mentor in Professor Dennis Vella, a figure who contributed significantly to promoting Maltese art, both historical and contemporary. Vella, who passed away in 2009, was the curator at the National Museum of Fine Art and formed an integral part of the Faculty of Art at the University of Malta. Lily cites him as the one who inspired her to take Maltese work seriously. It was his artist studio visits, she explains, that motivated her to explore Maltese art and artists. “Malta’s art-scene is indebted to him. Without him, so much local work would have been lost or underappreciated. But it wasn’t just his knowledge and passion for art that was inspirational. He also gave me the confidence to pursue my own career in contemporary art.” With a hunger for curation but no gallery of her own, Lily sought out numerous spaces to bring art to the public arena. “In the early days, I exhibited various artists’ work in different locations, mainly hotel lobbies. This proved to be successful, but it wasn’t sustainable, and I knew I could do more.” Having spent her formative years in London, she gained invaluable knowledge about arts and culture. “I could see a difference between how the arts were regarded in the UK and Malta. In London, art and culture was part of my everyday life. It ran in parallel to everything I did.” However, when she moved back to Malta, she soon discovered that that wasn’t necessarily the case in the country that she had now decided to call home. “So,” she adds candidly, “I thought to myself, well, I just have to find a way to expose intelligent and good art made by those people here that I believe are true artists.”
Photo by Elisa Von Brockdorff
Art business seemed to come naturally to Lily, but she recognised that she wanted more agency over her curatorial practice. By her late twenties, she made a bold move and decided to open her own gallery. “Having my own space allowed gave me a certain freedom to experiment with formats. And more importantly, to build my own programmes around my own timeframes.”
Artpaper / 024
In 2006 she also became editor of Manic!, a local lifestyle magazine that formed part of The Malta Independent. “When I joined the magazine, my first instinct was to add a section dedicated to local art.” But just one section in a magazine wouldn’t cut it, and in 2017, Lily had launched Artpaper, a publication dedicated solely to the Maltese and international art-scene. Her drive to do so, she maintains, was instinctual: “Anyone who works in the arts is just driven to do so by an inexplicable unconscious calling. I have made it my mission to be the instrument for the voice of true artists. Without art promoters and patrons, like myself, contemporary artists would have no way to express themselves or be heard at all. Especially in the Maltese context.”
