Giulia Andreani

L'Almanach 23 : Giulia Andreani

Born in 1985 (Venise, Italy). Works and lives in Paris. 

Acknowledgements: Max Hetzler gallery, Berlin, London, Marfa, Paris.

Giulia Andreani is an Italian painter born in Venice in 1985 and now living in Paris. Her work is based on extensive research of archival images and personal photographs, which serve as inspiration for her paintings.  
Andreani has a particular interest in significant historical periods of the twentieth century, Mussolini-era Italy and the Cold War being cases in point. Her portraits, which feature predominantly feminine subjects, tend to be rendered in Payne’s Grey. « Payne’s Grey fulfills a filtering function I appropriate faces and eyes and their stories by filtering them through this color »*
The majority of Giulia Andreani’s works interrogate the positions of women in history and contemporary society and excavates hidden story and reveals an uncomfortable truth.
Her 2022 tapestry painting Cancel Me Softly (le cours de sculpture) features Lucienne Heuvelmans, the first female sculptor who won the Prix Rome at the Villa Medici, with an entourage of unknown women who can be presumed to be artists as well. The subject is inspired by a photograph from the 1910s from the archives of the Beaux-Arts de Paris on which the artist notably worked during his residency at Villa Medici in 2017-2018.
By appropriating images in this way, Andreani can probe the problematics of history painting—but not without adding an autobiographical touch.
Her realist manner, playing “senza vergogna” with some of the so-called and embarrassing socialist realism gave her a twisted framework in which she set up her practice and the stories she decided to tell.
"L'Almanach 23" presents a panorama of his work since 2014 with new works and three tapestries brought together for the first time which revisit and transfer to this technique, the compositions of previous paintings.

* Interview with Jean-Marie Gallais in the studio of Giulia Andreani, 2020.