Malvina Middleton – Codes of Life

glassart - Malvina Middleton Glass Artist

Key Points
Malvina Middleton, born in Nicosia, Cyprus // 1986 – 1991 ristotelian University of Thessaloniki, Department of Fine and Applied Arts, Greece – Fine Art Painting (GR) // 1992 Heriot Watt University, The Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland (UK) // 1996 University of Wolverhampton – Master of Art (UK) // 1998 – 1999 Fine Art instructor, Frederick Institute of Technology, Nicosia (CYP)

Collections
Imagine Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida (United States) // Glasmuseum Lette – The Ernsting foundation Alter Hof Herding, Coesfeld // Glasmuseum – Achilles foundation, Hamburg (Germany) // State Gallery of Contemporary Cypriot Art in Nicosia // The Central Bank of Cyprus collection (Cyprus) // The Bibliotheca Alexandria collection (Egypt)

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Malvina Middleton’s career began in painting. Building on a vivid visual language of clear compositions, radiant colors, and bold forms, she later discovered a new field of expression in glass, a transparent medium she treats like a blank canvas, infusing it with colored light. Her artistic exploration with this material began by casting unnoticed fragments of everyday life in a new light. The ordinary became extraordinary, a quiet invitation to rediscover the invisible. Middleton challenges the viewer’s gaze by reinterpreting the familiar and transforming it into art.

This search culminated in a body of work where opposites are set in motion: massive geometric shapes meet asymmetrical, lighter forms reminiscent of birds or angels. The tension between weight and levity, between solidity and movement, becomes the central theme. In her next series, Middleton takes the exploration further: she deconstructs the deeply embedded messages of life itself. Hope and pain, the two fundamental poles of all organic existence, are translated into abstract, radiant structures. These works imagine a distant future in which life as we know it has vanished, leaving behind a coded trace, an aesthetically shaped memory of light, symmetry, texture, and space.

Her most recent works appear like remnants of a lost civilization, messages from a time when the laws of life were still inscribed in light, measure, and color. They speak a quiet, luminous language, sharp and mystical at once, often framed in symbolic square structures. An echo of something that seemed lost but was never truly gone. Like oracles, these works reveal traces of life, past but never extinguished, hovering between memory and renewal, chaos and order.

Influenced by the German Expressionists of the Brücke group, especially Karl Schmidt Rottluff, Kirchner, Heckel, and Nolde, Middleton combines emotional intensity with formal clarity. Through her glass works, she brings not only light into space but also a visionary idea of life and humanity. Her pieces are preserved messages about who we are and who we might yet become.