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 materializes 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 internalize or eroticize 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 practice reframes vulnerability as both erotic and empowered, exploring its entanglement with fetish, fantasy, and liberation.