Surfing Around The Maltese Islands

by Olaug Vethal

• Acrylics on canvas
• 110cm by 93cm stretched
• 114cm by 97cm framed
• Circa 1995- 2000

  In Surfing Around the Maltese Islands, Olaug Vethal transforms the Maltese seascape into an experience of movement, freedom and elemental energy. Painted between 1995 and 2000, the work belongs to a period in which Malta’s sea, beaches and landscapes became recurring subjects in her practice.Rather than recording the coastline literally, Vethal uses sweeping, spontaneous brushstrokes to capture what she described elsewhere as the energies absorbed from her surroundings and reformulated through colour and paint.

  Within her metaphysical world, surfing becomes a passage between states. The body encounters forces larger than itself: water, wind, movement and light, and momentarily becomes part of them. The Maltese sea is therefore both physical landscape and metaphysical space: a place where the boundaries between self and nature, body and energy, the visible and the unseen begin to dissolve.

  This work is currently hung at Spazju A, Spazju Kreattiv, Valletta until 25th October 2026 as part of the exhibition ‘Beyond The Visible | The Metaphysical Worlds of Olaug Vethal, curated by Christine Xuereb and in collaboration with Christine X Art Gallery.