GRIMM is pleased to announce Still Moving, a solo exhibition by British artist Louise Giovanelli, the Manchester-based artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. Still Moving is a collaboration with renowned movie theatre Metrograph in New York, and the artist will showcase new paintings created in relation to five selected films, concurrently screened to accompany the gallery exhibition.
Through interconnected series, Louise Giovanelli weaves together subtle visual clues which surround a specific moment or event. Her subject matter is deeply considered and only selected when a tension between organizational innovation, alongside painterly potency can be realized. The conceptual potential of these paintings is often extracted from sources such as staged photographs, film stills, classical sculptures, and architectural details. Working in groups of works, she considers ensembles or a chorus as visual narratives that collectively orbit a particular moment, mood, or event. These almost identical motifs offer subtly differentiated shifts in application, composition or color scheme. For this new body of work, Giovanelli draws inspiration from key cinematic moments found in films, which include The Brown Bunny (2003), Kids (1995), and Ticket of No Return (1979).
Giovanelli assembles each canvas by utilizing complex textures and sophisticated chromatic variations, applying under-painted color, often with a uniform electrifying vibrancy as the foundation for each work. The paintings are firmly situated in the present through the application of an apparently mechanical labour-intensive initial surface, which is then provided with a counterpoint through the introduction of applied delicate layers, which evoke both softness and control. Deftly manipulating light and form, her multivalent imagery reminds us that the classical foundations of painting remain sources of delight and innovation.
Keenly attuned to the historical significance of painting as a medium and system of representation, her work challenges the eye through the re-presentation of carefully crafted textures and patterns. For Giovanelli, painting allows for a visual slowing down and beholding her works becomes a meditative process, which holds the potential, as film does, for physiological transformation.
Giovanelli’s delicate, luminous works inject vitality into historical subjects from the canon of Western art. Curtains are a recurring motif in her practice. Their appeal lies not only in their visual seduction but also in their refusal: they become barriers, cool and impassable. Curtains are reimagined here as symbols of ambiguity, hovering between cinematic or theatrical unveiling and impenetrable closure. Her hyperreal depictions of drapery reference a long lineage of illusionistic painting. Despite their rich folds and surfaces, they remain closed, creating distance. Her work also stems from a fascination with transforming seemingly intangible textures and surfaces into painted form, a kind of alchemy that speaks to painting’s historical ability to render the impossible.