LOUISE GIOVANELLI: HERE ON EARTH
White Cube is pleased to presents Louise Giovanelli’s solo exhibition entitled Here on Earth. The artist’s luminous and intensely worked surfaces bring notions of theatricality and performance to the fore, traced through source material as wide ranging as Greek myth, old-master paintings and twentieth-century film-making.
March 26 – May 18, 2024
In ‘Here on Earth’, Giovanelli debuts the series ‘Maenad’ (2023–24), which comprises figurative oil paintings based on 1980s film stills. The title refers to the female followers of Dionysus – the Greek god of wine, fertility, festivity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy and theatre – who were often portrayed as wild and frenzied, engaging in dance, music and drinking in honour of their god.
For ‘Maenad’, Giovanelli drew particular inspiration from the Eleusinian Mysteries: ancient Greek rituals dedicated to the cult of Demeter and Persephone, in which participants were believed to undergo transcendental experiences facilitated by a drink or ‘potion’ known as kykeon. Although the exact details of the Mysteries were known only to initiates, women were believed to play a crucial role in the performance of the rites.
The exhibition title serves as a bridge between these intangible experiences and the physical world, forging connections between the spiritual and the corporeal through the materiality of paint and the interaction between artwork and viewer ‘here on earth’.
In Harmony (2024) the seemingly private rapture of ‘Maenad’ is replaced by one shared between two figures. Here, Giovanelli depicts a scene in which two young film characters kiss with wide-open mouths. The artist has cropped the image, creating a tall, elongated format that belies its origins in cinema.
The largest painting in the exhibition, Threadsoul (2024), sees Giovanelli return to a familiar motif: the curtain. Curtains hold an interesting history for Giovanelli, for their changeable role and their presence in both low and high culture: theatres, ballrooms, strip clubs, tired function rooms.
A curtain marks a threshold; there is always a behind and a front, and the idea of some form of opening and closing. In ‘Here on Earth’, the vast curtain acts as a backdrop for the exhibition. Densely pleated and permanently closed, it signals a promise of spectacle, of revelation and surprise from Giovanelli’s cast of performers – one that can never be fulfilled.