At our gift shop, Valletta Contemporary represents one of our artists: Patrick Fenech.

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Patrick Fenech is an established artist and photographer and works mainly from his studio in Senglea, an old fortified city in the Grand Harbour of Malta. He is a visiting lecturer of photography at the Faculty of Art Education and the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences at the University of Malta. Fenech is also the organizer and founding member of Valletta Photography Festival. Fenech started to take pictures, which reflected his search for artistic expression, after receiving painting tuition from the Malta School of Arts and his dad. His early photography works, the majority of them in black and white, are mainly based on a social documentary of the Maltese Islands in the early 80s. His enthusiasm for photography was fueled further by the visit of Mr Petr Tausk from the photography department of the Faculty of Arts at University of Prague who saw Fenech’s early works and acquired a few prints for his own collection. Petr Tausk published some important books on 20th century photography and introduced Fenech to Sue Davis at the time director of the Photographers Gallery in London.