Robert Zahra is a creative practitioner and art educator whose work spans drawings, paintings, and mixed media panels. Characterised by gestural marks and bold, decisive strokes, his art exudes urgency, impatience, and incisiveness. Zahra’s palette tends towards austerity, often favouring darker tones, allowing him to confront his recurring preoccupations and motifs directly. Known for producing large-scale works, Zahra explores urban landscapes, speculative environments, and figures. Throughout his creative career, he has also presented projects in various media, including sculpture, installations and environmental interventions. If one is to create spaces then one naturally needs space, Zahra seems to suggest. And space, so precious and premiumised on this island, is at once the key composing element and the composed. This is his visual vocabulary and he uses it to keep proposing new spaces to his audiences, clearings for existential despair or renewal.Zahra pursued Art Education at the Master’s level at the University of Malta (2011) and studied Painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan (2007). His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across Malta, Italy, and India. Key exhibitions include participation in Bodies (Auberge d’Italie, Valletta) in 2007 and 2011, as well as inclusion in Stemperando Biennale 5a Edizione (Torino-Cosenza- Roma), STRATI (2011, Auberge de France, Birgu), Tumbleweed (2015, MSA, Valletta) and The Glasshouse Project (2023-24).Significant solo shows include Mkejjen (2009) at Spazju Kreattiv,Valletta and Moving Lands (2017) at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. Mkejjen consists of series of drawings, paintings, etchings and photographic works that focus on the urban landscape – its built environment and its life. One of the main works from this series is now part of the National Collection, MUŻA. The body of works in Moving Lands interrogates urban spaces as temporary/ephemeral habitats. Moving Lands was one of the visual arts projects selected as part of the Cultural Programme of the 2017 Maltese Presidency of the Council of the EU: rEUnion. Robert Zahra is also a lecturer in Fine Arts at the Institute for the Creative Arts, MCAST and at the University of Malta. He has been involved in Art education since 1999 and managed the Malta School of Art between 2016 and 2019 where he brought a considerable change within the school’s structure in particular its’ educational programm. Photo of Robert Zahra: Credit to Gilbert Calleja.