Maïa Régis

Maïa Régis (b. 1995, Paris) lives and works in Palermo. She took a BA in fine art at Chelsea College of Arts and an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 2019. Her studio is in a Baroque palazzo overlooking Ballarò, Palermo's oldest street market, and the city runs through the work: sacred architecture, processions, market stalls, the collision of the devotional and the everyday. She paints in layered, saturated colour between figuration and abstraction, and builds compositions the way a producer samples, mixing sources into a single surface. Weapons, hidden figures and meat on hooks sit alongside flowers, fruit and bright colour, and the balance between the two is what keeps the work from tipping into either romanticism or moralising.

In 2025 she was commissioned by the Amici dei Musei Siciliani to paint a new Nativity for the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, in place of the Caravaggio stolen from the church in 1969 and never recovered. Solo exhibitions include Kilos at Carl Kostyál, London (2022), and her work has been shown at Francesco Pantaleone in Palermo, Badr El Jundi in Madrid, the South London Gallery and the Liverpool Biennial. She received the Bloomberg New Contemporaries Prize in 2017 and 2018 and the Griffin Art Prize in 2017.

Régis has worked with Plan X since 2023, with the solo exhibitions Carne di Goya at Plan X Capri and Terra Mia at Plan X Milan in 2024, and a solo presentation at Untitled Art Miami Beach the same year.