Sim Smith is proud to announce Anna Calleja’s first solo exhibition in the UK, One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night. This exhibition is an ode to the female experience, the contradictions within sexuality, bodily autonomy and queerness that challenge traditional conventions and expectations of the female role. In her paintings, Calleja opens up tender and sometimes tense scenes of everyday life, depicting herself and loved ones in compositions that hold multiple dualities, exploring themes of love, grief, isolation and connection whilst questioning the pattern and relevance of Catholic and patriarchal ideologies through her personal archive of images.
The paintings in this exhibition embody the contradiction of the title One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night, highlighting the paradoxical interweave of both dark and the light moments within relationships and domesticity. Comfort and pain sit at the heart of this exhibition, a juxtaposition that Calleja honestly and tenderly navigates as a young woman trying to make sense of her place today. The traditional role is to receive expectations placed upon a woman, a situation that Calleja saw generations of women in her family accept but also try to fight against. “…I had just been researching women in my family, generational feminists and this work became very personal. I was receiving an inherited role and feeling like it was very painful, accepting it with grace but also feeling very violent”. Anna Calleja, November 2024.
The title of the exhibition comes from an anonymous nonsense folk poem cited by Calleja’s grandfather. Holding on to memories is a big part of why Calleja paints, choosing images from her photographic archives of people she is close to and in places she holds as home in a moment in time. There is a longing in the paintings, a desire to hold on to things which explains the small, contained scale of her work “…it’s bodily and intimate, something I can hold to my chest”. Anna Calleja, November 2024.
There are deep referential contexts to every element of the paintings; Catholicism, poetry and the history of art coupled with the surface and materiality of the work, its size and the idea of icon painting. Each image has a narrative element unearthed through Calleja’s fascination with archival chronicles and tropes. For example, in the titles of her paintings she cites the American poet Emily Dickinson, specifically the poems “On that specific pillow” and “A not admitting of the wound”. Calleja is a treasure hunter, looking for memories within her own world but also in literature and history, uncovering her place within broader narratives.
Portraits in the exhibition include her parents, partner and Calleja herself at home, in bed, on the sofa, waiting for a bath to run. These images expose everyday moments where tension collides with comfort, and anxiety with security. Even where there are no bodies, crumpled bed linen and worn shoes tell the story of the people once within them.
In the oil on panel paintings Calleja adds and subtracts to the surface, scraping back to retain as much light as possible, searching for a moment where the painting and its energy come to life. The translucent nature of the surface is achieved through many hours of labour, sanding panels and making the surfaces smooth and fluid enough to accept one thin layer of paint, which, because of the quick-drying nature of her medium, sometimes necessitates painting through the night and into the early hours of the morning. There is as much compulsion as composition in her work, planning and painting, and then just painting and painting as the medium takes over and dictates the works’ ultimate destination.
The works on paper appear more gestural. There is a softness to paper that is not afforded by the hard panel surface of other works. Painting on paper is more natural, intuitive and impulsive allowing Calleja to access a different side of her practice. There are also monotypes in this exhibition, on paper made by Calleja in her studio from blended rags used to mop up paint, alluding to the cyclical nature of her practice and the idea of memory saturated in the paper as an object. There is a mysticism and change of energy to these works, they seem softer, more organic and therefore also subject to chance.
Journalling is a significant part of Calleja’s practice, acknowledging self-reflection and female anxiety set against male calm, confidence and ease. Many of the paintings express these feelings of turbulence and questioning. There is an element of surveillance of her life across journalling, painting and living. Many of the paintings are of watching her partner asleep, whereas she is always painted awake, often reflected in mirrors or phone screens.
Phones appear again and again referencing connectedness and isolation, outside worlds, societal expectation, impending pressure, and external value systems. The phones in Calleja’s work reference the Claude glass used by artists, travellers and connoisseurs of landscape in the Victorian era. The black glass would give the effect of reducing and simplifying the colour and tonal range of scenes and scenery to give a painterly quality. The user would turn their back on the scene to observe the framed view through the tinted mirror, in a sort of pre-photographic lens, which added the picturesque aesthetic of a subtle gradation of tones. Calleja talks of the very human desire to filter the world, to narrow down and distil.
“This is what painting does for me - storing memories - making a headspace physical. As if through a Claude glass, or a phone screen, it is a paradoxical place of filtering down in order to access a more profound reality in the search for something deeper.”
