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, where 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 dreamscapes through layered, blurred compositions and vivid colour palettes. In her work, women glow with power and energy. They are soft and sensual yet confident and strong. They are vulnerable, but with autonomy. Nature flows through them; they are stars, the sun, the moon, wind, rain, lightning, and storms.  They are one with their inner selves and intrinsically connected to nature. Nature is inherently female, a nurturing and life-giving force that flows in cycles.

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