Anton Agius

Biography

Anton Agius’s first interest was music. He did not pursue it seriously: his mother had doubts about the choice.

He was born on 1 December 1933 in Rabat, the son of Ġużeppi and Stella Agius (née Galea). He first attended the state school in Rabat. His cousin, the sculptor Samuel Bugeja, taught him drawing. In his teens Agius was an apprentice to the sculptor Guzeppi Galea. From 1950 to 1953 he studied at the Malta Society of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce under Ignazio Cefai, and then spent four years at the School of Arts, where his teachers were Emvin Cremona, Vincent Apap and Ġorġ Borg, with the last of whom he studied clay modelling. In 1957 the government awarded him a scholarship to study in Rome. There, at the Scuola del Nudo of the Associazione Artistica Internazionale at the Accademia di Belle Arti, his teachers were Pericle Fazzini and Michele Guerrisi. He then went to London, to St Martin’s School of Art, where he studied under Frank Martin, Elizabeth Frink, Anthony Caro and Eduardo Paolozzi. He returned from London with a national diploma in design, modelling, sculpture and letter cutting.

After that his life was divided between the studio and teaching. Agius taught art in several state secondary schools in Malta, lectured at the University of Malta and sat on the Malta Aesthetics Board. He worked in clay, bronze, concrete, stone, resin and wood, and made lino prints. Wood, it is reported, was his favourite. A collection of his olive-wood works, accompanied by his own drawings, is housed in the Mdina Cathedral Museum. For Rabat he made works for churches and for the St Paul Band Club, and he gave some of his pieces to the parish museum. Among his notable works are the crucifix for the Kerygma Chapel and the statue of St Francis of Assisi at the entrance of the Peace Lab. In 2003 his statue “Greenham Marcher” was placed in the foyer of Cardiff City Hall; it commemorates the women who protested at Greenham Common.

The best-known part of his output is the monuments across the island, all of them devoted to people and events important to Malta. Agius also designed several Maltese postage stamps: in 1971 a stamp with Dun Karm, in 1972 three stamps with a heart and the emblem of the World Health Organization, in 1977 a series on Maltese workers, and in 1986 a stamp for the International Year of Peace.

His works were shown in exhibitions: at the National Museum (in 1969 according to some data, in 1963 according to others), at the Museum of Fine Arts (1974, 1979), at the Galleria Fenici (1981, Maltese sculpture and ceramics), at “Art ’84 – Malta” (1984), at the Public Service Week art exhibition (1996) and at the 13th Bank of Valletta exhibition (2005).

Agius died on 19 October 2008, aged 74. His funeral was held on 22 October in the Church of the Nativity of Our Lady in Rabat, and he was buried in St Margaret Cemetery in Rabat. After his death several initiatives kept his memory alive. In 2009 the Culture Commission of the L’Isle Adam Band Club in Rabat organised an exhibition for the first anniversary of his death, with sculptures, statues, models and bozzettos, and in 2010 an exhibition in Mosta was organised by the society Talent Mosti, of which he was an honorary member. Also in 2009, the Rabat local council set up the Anton Agius Foundation to restore the town’s historic monuments, buildings and niches.

A monument to the sculptor himself was unveiled in Rabat on 7 May 2011. Agius sits at his workbench carving fish from a piece of olive wood, with his two dogs beside him. The design was made by his student Joseph Scerri, the fish, after the wooden “Shoal of Fish”, by another student, Monica Spiteri, and the bench is a replica of the real one: his brother Micheal Agius took a plaster cast of it. The bronze was cast in Pietrasanta, at the Fonderia d’Arte Massimo del Chiaro, a foundry Agius had worked with during his lifetime and whose owners’ family he had befriended.