Ambia I

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Downing Street

Louise Giovanelli employs a layering technique to build composite works that simultaneously presents multiple modes of representation and explores painterly concepts of flatness, translucence, abstraction and realism. Her use of luminous deep blue-blacks that saturate the surface further reveals the painting’s own history by scratching fine lines to expose layers of multi-coloured underpainting. The painting’s title opens further avenues of interpretation, ‘Ambia’ being an arabic word used as a female name meaning 'Prophet Muhammad's Relative'.

In the artist’s own words:

My practice is informed by ways of looking and perceiving, with the act of looking itself as a kind of content. I employ found and generated images, cultural references and excerpts from other art forms to investigate the languages and histories of painting. [My works] are results of things noticed, measured, assembled – In a sense the paintings are a refusal to give into the idea of the scriptic authorial  touch. They are not about me, they are through or of me.

Born in London, Louise Giovanelli lives and works in Manchester. She completed her BA in Fine Art at Manchester School of Art in 2015, and an MA at Städelschule in Frankfurt Am Main, Germany, under the renowned US painter Amy Sillman, in 2020. Giovanelli has exhibited in London, Germany and the United States since 2015. Recent solo exhibitions include: GRIMM, New York (2020); Frutta Gallery, Rome (2019); Manchester Art Gallery and Workplace Foundation, Gateshead (2019). She has also participated in group exhibitions including: ‘Life Still’, C.L.E.A.R.I.N.G., New York (2020); ‘El oro de los tigres’, Air de Paris, Romainville (2020); and ‘Touching from a Distance’, The Conduit, London (2019).

Places

Subjects

abstract, petal, blackness, flora

Materials & Techniques

canvas, paint, oil, oil painting, underpainting

Artist

Louise Giovanelli (1993 - )

Title

Ambia I

Date

2018

Medium

oil on canvas

Dimensions

height: 116 cm; width: 81.5 cm; depth: 2 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from the artist via Division of Labour,, with funds raised from print sales from the Robson Orr TenTen Award, a GAC/Outset Annual Commission, 2019

Inscription

verso: inscribed by the artist 'Giovanelli 18', top left

Provenance

The artist via Division of Labour; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection with funds raised from print sales from the Robson Orr TenTen Award, a GAC/Outset Annual Commission, 2019

GAC number

18813