LOUISE GIOVANELLI

Early Years

Born in London in 1993 to Italian and Irish parents, Giovanelli grew up in Monmouth, South Wales, before relocating to Manchester for her studies. She earned a BA in Fine Art from Manchester School of Art in 2015, graduating with first-class honours. Giovanelli later completed postgraduate studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, under the guidance of Amy Sillman, from 2018 to 2020. She now lives and works in Manchester, UK.

Louise Giovanelli Artworks

Giovanelli’s art practice is defined by her meticulous, light-saturated paintings that distil and reframe fragments from film, photography, Old Master paintings, and everyday encounters. Her works often present cropped, ambiguous scenes—curtains, hair, glass, or glimpses of figures—inviting viewers into psychologically charged spaces where the narrative is suspended and meaning is elusive.

Motifs and Developments

Curtains and Theatricality

A recurring motif in Giovanelli’s oeuvre is the stage curtain, depicted in monumental scale and rendered with velvet-like softness. These works reference both the spectacle of performance and the spiritual promise of revelation, alluding to the boundaries between the sacred and the mundane. As Giovanelli has noted before, ‘These curtains, once thrown back, offer this promise to enter another realm—and once closed, contain that promise. The painting hangs in a suspended state, leaving us wondering whether the show is over or, in fact, just beginning’.

Film, Pop Culture, and Art History

Giovanelli’s paintings often draw on film stills, images of pop icons, and details from Renaissance and Byzantine art. Works such as Altar (2022) reinterpret iconic scenes—like Sissy Spacek’s portrayal of the prom queen in Carrie—through a lens of heightened colour and ambiguity, blending horror and beauty. Her series of hair paintings, based on staged photographs of wigs, further exemplify her interest in surface, texture, and the transformation of the familiar into the uncanny.

Repetition and Doubling

Repetition is central to Giovanelli’s process, with near-identical paintings produced in series to probe perception and memory. Each iteration introduces subtle shifts in composition or tone, reinforcing her exploration of ambiguity and the limits of recognition.

Light and Materiality

Giovanelli’s technique involves thin underpainting and careful modulation of paint to achieve glowing, tactile surfaces. She is especially attentive to the effects of light on skin, fabric, and reflective materials, often working from digitally altered images to heighten their sense of unreality.

Exhibitions

Louise Giovanelli has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions at major institutions.

Solo Exhibitions

• A Song of Ascents, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, UK, 2024–2025
• Louise Giovanelli. Here on Earth, White Cube, Hong Kong, 2024
• Louise Giovanelli – Paintings 2019–2024, He Art Museum, Foshan, China, 2024
• Louise Giovanelli, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK, 2019–2020
• Auto-da-fé, GRIMM, New York, 2021
• A Priori, GRIMM, Amsterdam, 2020

Group Exhibitions

• Mixing It Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery, London, 2021
• FLAG Art Foundation, New York, 2023
• AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam, 2021
• MOCA, Los Angeles; ICA Miami; Tate, London (collections)

Website and Instagram

Louise Giovanelli’s website can be found here, and her Instagram account is here.

Critical Reception

Giovanelli’s art has been featured in leading publications, including Frieze, The New York Times, ArtReview, The Art Newspaper, and Ocula Magazine. As Frieze notes, her paintings are ‘concerned with stillness and anticipation—with what is, isn’t and might soon be seen’. Ocula Magazine highlights her ‘sense of wonder’ and her ability to ‘give significance to otherwise overlooked details’.

Louise Giovanelli FAQs

John Hurrell | Ocula | 2025