1951–present
Norbert Francis Attard
The Maltese artist Norbert Francis Attard worked as an architect for twenty years, designing posters and stamps, and in 1998 turned to installation art. In 1999 he represented Malta at the 48th Venice Biennale. Since 2001 he has directed the residency GOZO Contemporary on the island of Gozo, and in 2018 he opened the gallery Valletta Contemporary in Valletta.
Biography
The first book to include his work appeared in 1978: a handmade box with twelve poems by Michael Zammit and three signed lithographs by Attard. He was twenty-six and had not yet left architecture.
He was born on 4 October 1951 in Sliema, Malta. He was a self-taught painter and graphic artist, from 1966 according to some accounts. In 1977 he graduated in architecture from the University of Malta. In 1978–1979 he lived in Germany and worked at the firm Licht in Raum (“light in space”), headed by Johannes Dinnebier, one of the first German specialists in lighting design. He practised as an architect until 1996, for about twenty years. Alongside this he made prints, posters, book covers and postage stamps: for theatres, national associations, embassies and cultural institutions he built up a sizeable collection of posters, and Malta issued eight sets of stamps to his designs. In 1983 the Galleria De Amicis in Florence published the catalogue “Norbert Attard, Artist in Malta, 1977–1983”, with an introduction by Dominic Cutajar and a foreword by Richard England. In 1996 the Roemer- und Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim published the book “Prints and Paintings, 1977–1996”.
From 1998 he concentrated on installation art. His work brings together architecture, sculpture, video and photography, and the relationship to a place and the memory of that place is, according to critics, decisive for him. He tries to balance contradictory themes and ideas by showing how they are connected. I would add that his architectural training shows: many pieces are made as an intervention in a specific space.
In 1998 he took part in the 19th Biennale of Alexandria and showed the project “Transkutan” in Olympia Park in Munich, and he worked at an international art symposium in Chonju, South Korea. In 1999 he exhibited at the 2nd Florence Biennale and represented Malta at the 48th Venice Biennale.
The following decade was spent travelling. From 1998 to 2008, or to 2010 according to some accounts, he created site-specific installations in various countries and took part in group exhibitions in Scotland, England, Cuba, Austria, Italy, Spain, Germany, Liechtenstein, Turkey, Greece, South Korea, Australia, the United States and Taiwan. Among them were the Edinburgh International Arts Festival and the Edinburgh City Art Centre (2000, 2002), the 2nd Liverpool Biennial (2002), the 8th Havana Biennial (2003), “Post-Civilisation” at the Kaohsiung International Container Festival (2003), “ARTiade” for the Athens Olympics (2004), a project in Kamiyama, Tokushima Prefecture (2004), and “The Exhausted Body” at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (2005). The book “Four Olympics” was published in New York in 2004, “I See Red Everywhere” in Glasgow in 2002, and “Between Earth and Sky”, together with Heritage Malta, in 2007; in the last, the photographs of Malta’s prehistoric sites were taken by Daniel Cilia. Since 2001 Attard has directed GOZO Contemporary, a space where visiting artists live and work on the island of Gozo. From 2002 to 2005 he sat on the committee of the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts.
In 2018 the conceptual art gallery he founded, Valletta Contemporary, opened in Valletta. It also publishes VC Editions: works the gallery commissions from artists who have already exhibited in its rooms.
Profile notes