This extensive monograph presents the full scope of Giulia Andreani’s oeuvre from 2011 to today in more than 150 paintings, watercolors, and sculptures. Artistic research on representations of women, power, and society is an essential element of the painter’s work. Thus her practice begins in archives or on the Internet, unearthing historical images of women and men who through their roles or actions embody certain aspects of social relations: resistance fighters, scientists, dictators and their wives, patriarchal artists, or children at play are either translated into portrait paintings from their sources, or they become parts of complex collaged scenarios in imaginary history paintings. All the works are held in various hues of Payne’s gray, putting their protagonists on the same stage in a dialogue across the ages. Found photographs, digital treatment, and painterly invention are equal means to arrive at a picture of the female gaze that is always to be questioned. “The artist’s take on art history is porous and to a certain extent impure,” Flavia Frigeri writes in her essay, “but it is instrumental in placing women at the center of the picture, quite literally.”

Grauzone. Giulia Andreani for the Illiterate
(excerpt from the essay by Erik Verhagen)

There is some part of mystery in the artist’s imagined path. From the discovery of her photographic sources to their appropriation and transformation, numerous mechanisms come into play that confer onto her transport de l’image a processual perspective, showing us that painting—pictorial becoming—is also temporal. The role intuition plays in her choice of photos is not insignificant. Once the source, anonymous or known, is selected, Giulia Andreani begins a process of deconstructing, erasing, filtering, enabling her to retain essential elements that, after being metamorphosed and reconverted into pictorial signs, are enhanced and combined with other ‘figures’ borrowed from complementary sources or invented expressly for this purpose. A way for her to propose new scenarios starting with a puzzle whose pieces have been rearranged. Questions of scale are clearly important here, and it is only once the works have been hung that their pictorial quality comes to the fore. A quality that evolves in keeping with the presentations and materials. Her works on paper, compact and small in format, with their unstable aqueous matter, are thus based on a different mode of functioning from that of her acrylics on canvas or paintings made in situ, conducive to creating compositions with broader iconological potentialities, exacerbating the reading grids and/or, on the contrary, neutralizing them. Because when W.J.T. Mitchell writes that images can want “nothing at all,” he grants them the right to take refuge in silence, that other figure of the neutral that, according to Barthes, refers to “a sort of timeless virginity of things, before they are born or after they have disappeared.” Depending on the situation and on our desire to engage in dialogue with them, Giulia Andreani’s paintings can be either expressive or silent. They are consequently “marked with all the stigmata of personhood: they exhibit both physical and virtual bodies; they speak to us, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. They present, not just a surface, but a face that faces the beholder.” They situate themselves on the threshold, and only this location can do them justice …

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In collaboration with Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London