Melissa Magg (b.2001) is a British-German figurative oil painter and filmmaker 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.

She subverts the male gaze on a woman’s vulnerability, which is typically presented as a voiceless, passive, and sexualised one, and renders it from her own female gaze, where she believes a woman can be powerful, erotic, and find agency in her own vulnerability.

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.

Drawing on imagery from personal photography and cinema, her work materialises emotional states through layered, blurred compositions and sensual colour palettes. She paints women as strong, glowing, and resilient.

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