Louise Giovanelli Receives ‘Gold Standard’ UK Government Art Award

Manchester-based artist Louise Giovanelli, known for her use of contemporary and historical imagery to examine the physical qualities of paint, has been named as the 2026 recipient of the Robson Orr TenTen Award, presented by the UK’s Government Art Collection. 

Each year the award sees one British artist commissioned to create a unique, limited-edition print, with 15 of these editions then displayed in government buildings and embassies around the world, and an additional 11 sold to support the acquisition of new works to the collection. Previous winners of the award, which is supported by philanthropists Sybil Robson Orr and Matthew Orr, include Lubaina Hamid, Denzil Forrester and Rachel Whiteread.

Announcing Giovanelli’s win earlier today, minister for arts and museums Ruth Mackenzie said the prints should be used to trigger an interest in art among young people, and create a “talent ladder” for the UK’s emerging artists. She described the award as “a model of a private-public partnership” and “one of the gold standard ways in which government and philanthropy can work together on something that is co-created, co-conceived, co-delivered”.

Giovanelli’s commission, Media Luna, takes its name from the Spanish for crescent or half moon, reflecting the artist’s interest in finding connections between the human and the celestial, the intimate and the universal. The image belongs to a series of works in which Giovanelli uses wigs as her subject, and was created using many layers of distortion, rotating the image, rephotographing and creating a doubling effect, alongside the introduction of “little glints and specks, and a feeling of celluloid” in post-production.

Media Luna is intended to function as a “site of reflection” amid the political and diplomatic settings in which it will be displayed. The work’s exploration of the real and the artificial is a nod to timely conversations around celebrity, artificial intelligence and social media.

Discussing her practice at the Government Art Collection earlier today, Giovanelli said: “I often gravitate towards objects that are actually very familiar to people, so drapery, curtains, wigs, film stars, pop iconography. But I’m always attempting to make these familiar objects strange in a certain way, so that people recognise something, but are unsettled… I want [the objects] to be at the same time familiar and unfamiliar.”

The artist, who was raised in South Wales, and has been based in Manchester since 2020 and represented by White Cube since 2022, noted the difficulty of coming “straight out of art school, graduating and trying to find your feet”. In 2023 she co-founded of her own art school in the northern city, the Apollo Painting School, alongside gallerist and curator Alice Amati, and artist and academic Ian Hartshorne.

“Really, it began out of a frustration and a dissatisfaction with how we saw the arts offering, the conventional art school system in the UK,” Giovanelli explained. “As soon as I could manage giving back a little bit, I just thought it was the right thing to do, because for me it was quite a struggle to try and establish myself out of art school, not in a metropolis or in a capital city, not in London.” 

Despite this, the artist remained in Manchester, having fallen “deeply in love” with the city, which she described as having “so much cultural potential”. 

“The Brit Awards were hosted there, the BBC have moved there and the prime minister’s now from there,” she said, referencing Andy Burnham’s time as mayor of the city, and his recent decision to create a base for his operations there, known as Number 10 North. “The visual arts is obviously my realm, and I already see there’s more of a focus, and the finger of potential is pointing to Manchester.” 

The UK’s Government Art Collection brings together historic, modern and contemporary British art, and displays it in locations including 10 and 11 Downing Street, Number 10 North and the offices and residences of British ambassadors and high commissioners in more than 125 countries. The TenTen Award, now on its ninth edition, is a 10-year programme designed to celebrate British artists and broaden the Government Art Collection.