Anna Calleja, artist: “I find it interesting to see how I change with age, compared to all those ads about getting rid of wrinkles and the fear of aging.”
Tania López García, Vogue Spain
February 2025
The art historian Kenneth Clark, referring to the numerous times Rembrandt painted himself throughout his life, said that he was the first painter to turn his self-portraits into a biography. A similar attitude to that of the Dutch painter can be seen in the self-portraits of Anna Celleja (Valletta, 1997), in which we see her holding a mobile phone in front of a mirror, as we have all done at some point, part of her face in shadow, questioning the reflection. This is Calleja’s painting: a collection of everyday scenes in which we can find and recognize ourselves. The repetition of scenes and motifs is a fundamental part of her work, which she herself calls autobiographical. “I find it very interesting to be able to see how I change with age, compared to all those advertisements about getting rid of wrinkles and the fear of aging ,” she commented in an interview with Vogue Spain.