The Universal Man Exhibition at il-Kamra ta’ Fuq This July
This July, il-Kamra ta’ Fuq hosts The Universal Man, the debut solo exhibition by emerging Maltese artist Cristian Sammut. Running from 18 July to 3 August and curated by Melanie Erixon, this powerful body of work delves into the raw, instinctive, and deeply human, offering a visceral exploration of what lies beneath identity and form.
Drawing inspiration from the mark-making traditions of early cave art and outsider expression, Sammut strips representation down to its core. His portraits, painted exclusively from life, shed all traces of individual identity, age, and culture to become something more primal. These are not people as we know them, but archetypes; gestural, fluid, and universal figures that speak to a collective human experience.
“The portraits aren’t about personality or likeness”, Sammut explains. “They’re about presence. I want to get to the essence of being, what’s left when everything else is stripped away.”
Alongside these haunting, faceless portraits, Sammut presents abstracted figures that stretch, twist, and dissolve across the canvas. Limbs emerge and vanish. Bodies flicker between motion and stillness. Using bold, unapologetic strokes of oil and acrylic, he creates compositions that reject polish in favour of immediacy and intuition.
There is no set narrative, but rather an ongoing rhythm; a dance between emergence and disappearance. Sammut’s work lives in this space between the physical and the spiritual, asking not just how we depict the human form, but why we feel compelled to do so at all.
The exhibition’s title, The Universal Man, suggests a return to origin, to a state of indistinction where the boundaries between self and other dissolve. In a world that often fragments us, Sammut’s work seeks the opposite: a shared human language written in movement, gesture, and raw mark-making.
Born in Malta and based between London and his home country, Cristian Sammut is a self-taught painter and trained architect whose artistic practice embraces subconscious creation, fluid abstraction, and instinctive expression. His work continues to be informed by his architectural research into ornamentation and community, as well as by the intimacy of small-scale social bonds. He previously exhibited as part of ARC: Art from Rebellion and Connection at the Cookhouse Gallery (UAL), hosted by The Queer Museum in 2024.
The Universal Man is Sammut’s most personal and expansive work to date—a profound exploration of what it means to be human when all else falls away.
