Melissa Magg

Melissa Magg (b.2001) is a British-German figurative oil painter living and working in London. Her paintings investigate the aestheticized and romanticised figure of the vulnerable woman, rendered in soft, uncanny dreamscapes where fear and pleasure intertwine.

Drawing on imagery from cinema, horror, and personal photography, her work materialises emotional states through layered, blurred compositions and sensual colour palettes. She interrogates the cultural obsession with the ‘beautiful dead girl’—a recurring symbol across art history, horror films, and literature—and questions whether this allure is a culturally conditioned desire or an inherent one.

Magg is particularly interested in the female gaze upon this vulnerability: how women may internalise, eroticise, or even find agency in the spectacle of their own annihilation.

Her recent work explores the transformation from “girlhood to monstress,” a trope in horror where passive femininity turns predatory—its monstrousness often standing in for patriarchal anxieties around female autonomy and rage. Her paintings, Drenched in a Menstrual Panic, All the Pink Purity in the World Couldn't Possibly Save Her, and Seething, explore these ideas.

They play with imagery from the films 'The Exorcist', 'Carrie', and 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me', where she has taken film stills and layered, blurred, and experimented with colour to create new imagery. These films are representative of the 'girl to monstress' trope and the eroticisation of female death and sexuality. The presence of a young girl's bedroom is apparent in her installation piece Soft Things With Sharp Edges and within the imagery of the paintings.

Magg explored in her research the importance of the adolescent girl's bedroom as a set in these films. It represents the transitional phase from girl to woman, when a girl hits puberty and is caught in flux between childhood and adulthood. The room is drenched with pink, a colour used to emphasise naivety, girlishness, and purity.

This trope highlights patriarchal fears of women's bodies and sexuality; In 'Carrie' her starting her period is demonised and in 'The Exorcist' Reagan is at an age of hitting puberty, becoming ‘a woman’ and she turns demonic, her white nightgown is defiled with bodily fluid, her ‘purity’ corrupted.

The paintings portray the rage, fear, and vulnerability of their monstrousness, but perhaps from the perspective of the female gaze, the monstrousness is a protest, rebellion, and release from patriarchal constraints; the fire and levitation further emphasise this freedom and wild abandon. 

Her practice reframes vulnerability as both erotic and empowered, exploring its entanglement with fetish, fantasy, and liberation.