British Artist Louise Giovanelli, represented by White Cube, is speaking from her studio, a former tram depot in Manchester, England, which she is about to leave for New York. She says she has made half the pieces for a show of new paintings, opening in May at GRIMM, and will finish the rest in situ.

Giovanelli’s work teases out contemporary themes and ideas via a deep consideration for the history of painting. Her reference points can range from Fra Angelico to Joanna Lumley’s Absolutely Fabulous character, Patsy Stone. 

Her current show 'Louise Giovanelli: A Song of Accents' at The Hepworth Wakefield, which will travel to HALLE FÜR KUNST, Steiermark in Austria in June and features ten newly commissioned and nine existing works was the site of the first meeting between the artist and Professor Jennifer Sliwka, PhD and the Keeper of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England.

Sliwka has previously held esteemed posts at The National Gallery, The Victoria & Albert Museum and The British Museum and has curated a range of exhibitions, including ‘Botticini’s Palmieri Altarpiece’ at The National Gallery 2015–16, ‘Monochrome: Painting in Black and White, also at The National Gallery and Kunstpalast Düsseldorf 2017–18, and ‘Reframed: The Woman at the Window’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery 2022.

Sliwka joins our Zoom call from the Ashmolean Museum where she has just been explaining to the museum’s staff the significance of their recent acquisition of an early Crucifixion painting by Fra Angelico, circa 1420s. She is excited for Louise to see this masterwork in the flesh in the near future. 

Let’s begin.

Simon: Can you pinpoint a moment or an object that sparked your path toward a creative life? 

Jennifer: That’s a daunting and inspiring opening question.

Louise: I feel boring to say this again, but I guess that means that it's the answer to the question because it keeps recurring. Thinking about pilgrimages to certain paintings, in my case, historical artworks, was really quite a vital and significant time for me when I started art school. I would have been 18 or 19, and I started to travel around Europe to various museums and historical collections. 

One trip that I remember very vividly was visiting the Ghent Altarpiece [finished in c.1432], to see the [Hubert and Jan] van Eyck. It was actually being restored at the time, so part of it wasn't there, which initially was a bit disappointing, but then it turned out that you could go and visit it where it was being restored. That was a really magical day, because you could see the restorers working behind a window, and actually removing the varnish. I made a painting based on that, which, now that I think about it probably was the first ever curtain or drapery painting I made. 

It was one of the bottom parts of the panel where the Madonna is wearing a very sculptural, draped dress. The conservator had removed exactly half of the varnish, so there was this really beautiful, kind of formal element to it, where it was exactly  halved. You could see this tonal shift in variation. I made a painting in response to that, which was just the cropped element of this drapery. I didn't make a drapery work for about probably three or four years after. But now I really want to find that painting.

Simon: What was the painting called?

Louise: ‘The Unveiling.’ Ever since then, I've done the same thing whenever I’ve tried to take some time off. It's always based around this idea of a pilgrimage. Recently, I went to Malta just to see the Caravaggio. I think we talked about that last time, Jennifer.

Jennifer: I think I’ve dedicated my whole life to making those art pilgrimages. They never disappoint. Or if they disappoint you in one way because you have a certain expectation you find something else of interest. I love that your first curtain painting was actually a fragment of the Virgin’s dress.

Louise: It wasn’t until recently that I realised it was the first curtain painting.

Jennifer: Maybe at that time it was drapery in your mind, but now you realise it was a curtain. A kind of retrospective thinking maybe?

Louise: I thought it was drapery at the time, but it wasn't really, because I didn't show any of the Madonna's head or any element that would signify there was a human there. It was the crop, really zoomed in, so that it completely removed it from its original context. Then it could be a curtain or some other sort of drapery.

Jennifer: I'm going to segue here but my iPhone is full of details of paintings. I make those pilgrimages around the world, and I always take detail shots of drapery. I'm so interested in them and in what they look like abstracted. I’m often struck by how contemporary they look, even though they're 600 years old or something.

I curated a whole exhibition on monochrome paintings [at the National Gallery in London, 2017]. One of the works was a [Domenico] Ghirlandaio drapery study, sometimes attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. The show was transhistorical, so it covered 700 years of the history of art and revealed how some historic artworks looked like they were painted yesterday. How a black and white drapery study might appear really contemporary even though it was one of the oldest objects in the room.

Louise: I think that's always a good signifier of a very important piece of art when it's 500 years old and it looks like it was made today. That achievement is significant.

Jennifer: And weirdly shocking! How it can still be so arresting that it stops you in your tracks?

Louise: Have you seen those Fayum Egyptian portraits? They feel so contemporary. When you look at their faces and how they’re painted. You think ‘how can they be that old?’

Jennifer: We have some [at the Ashmolean]. I often think ‘I know that person’ [in the works].

Louise: Yes! The realism.

Jennifer: I was in Vienna recently in their Egyptian collection [at the Kunsthistorisches Museum], they have a huge collection of Fayum and they've installed them in a way that's very Carlo Scarpa on these metal upright plinths, so the heads are at eye level,. They're not laid flat, as you would expect as laid in a sarcophagus. It's just a grouping of heads standing on these metal uprights. It's the most extraordinary installation. It looks contemporary and shocking. I keep thinking about those. That could be one of your next pilgrimages?

To go back to the question about something that sparked an early interest in a creative career, I think back to my childhood and my first visit to the Pantheon in Rome. I was a bored (but lucky) eight year old being dragged around with my architect father, who to this day, and I love him for it, can give you a lecture on any building in the world so you better be ready [laughs]. This was probably the tenth thing we’d seen that day. But then I found myself suddenly listening more to what he had to say and asking questions in that building.

What I thought was so stunning about it was the sense of walking inside a building but also being outside, the idea of creating a hole in the roof that's deliberate, that connects the earth with the sky and allows the elements in, which, I adored. But I think part of the attraction was also learning the history. It was an ancient temple, a second-century temple that then became another temple, that then became a church. That layering of history is also the thing I love about Rome. I grew up in Toronto where everything was brand new, efficient and quite boring and neutral.

Simon: There is so much to look at in Rome, everywhere you go. It’s a lot! Actually, I wanted to ask you both about this idea of ‘slow looking’ and to hear a bit more from both of your perspectives—artist and curator—about how to look at art and what you get from looking. It's such a simple idea in a way, but also complicated.

Louise: ‘Slow looking’ is something I’ve been thinking about for many years, since I started art school and I started to consider painting very seriously. It was born out of something I noticed with viewers of art, myself included at that time: in galleries and museums people would skim across works and not spend any considerable amount of time looking at them at all. And I just kept thinking, ‘why is that?’ Is it the day and age that we live in? Is it image proliferation? What is it? Then, as I started to make artworks myself, that became part of the process, because I was consciously trying to keep the viewer’s eye within the picture frame.

'Slow looking’ is to draw people's attention through formal aspects and compositional considerations and all the things that are necessary to make a painting.

There are artworks that I've encountered where you just find your eyes slipping out of the picture plane. And it's not always to do with the content. I think a lot of the time it's formal or compositional elements and technical things to do with where things are placed spatially, and the coloration, the surface and the texture all of these things. I became very interested in these elements more than the image. The image side of things has come back to me in these last few years, and I think now I'm able to hold both in equilibrium when I make a painting. But, yes, I just think those things are really left unconsidered by so many artists.

‘Slow looking’—it’s kind of almost meditative. When you find yourself doing it with other artists and other artworks, so many things happen through the looking. It's not just one dimensional standing in front of something looking at it and considering it, the experience shifts and changes. If you're able to spend upwards of three minutes with an artwork, it's a really contemplative, almost spiritual experience. It's really hard to define. I don't know about you Jennifer, but it's just slowing everything down, rather than scrolling.

Jennifer: When I heard you talking about ‘slow looking’ I was smiling because it’s such a curatorial, art historian term. I can hear myself lecturing my students about ‘slow looking.’ But it was the first time I’ve ever heard an artist talk about it. And of anyone, of course it should be artists. But artists don't often verbalise their own practice.

I teach ‘slow looking’ and have been trained by my curatorial mentors to think about it.

From a curatorial perspective, I encourage everything you just mentioned. I’m not a maker of artworks so I can’t do what you do but I often wonder what curators can do to promote 'slow looking?' I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I've been doing gallery re-hangs. For instance, if you group a number of very similar things together that repetition does one thing to the brain and you know a lot about this, Louise and then if you have an interruption of that ‘sameness’ or an unexpected object, you can stop someone in their tracks, encourage them to look closely to figure our why that object is there. I tend to do that more in temporary exhibitions than permanent hangs, potentially for obvious reasons.

Louise, I also do what you do I watch people in galleries, see how they circulate through a space. Visitors to museums often skim the labels as they walk through a room, and then I watch them to see when they look up at the painting. They might start with the text, though you should always start with the image. So, I was taught by one of my great mentors to write something in the label that will make the viewer go ‘what?’ so that they go back and look for that teeny detail or that exquisite, idiosyncratic thing in the artwork.

Louise: I’m very anti-labels. If I could have a gallery without any labels, I would definitely move towards that way of looking. But I understand their value and why people like to read more about the artist, I’d prefer if that could be condensed onto one wall, or something. Because people automatically want to read what something is, and then make a judgement based on that before they even look!

Simon: I’m quite obsessed with titles though. I love how thought provoking they can be.

Louise: Titles are good. I really dislike people who use ‘Untitled’. That’s a strong opinion I have. I think a title is really important otherwise, I think it’s lazy.

Jennifer: I particularly adore Louise’s titles. We talked about this briefly at your show but what I enjoy about them is that they make the viewer look again. And sometimes they're quite challenging. You might use a word that's in Latin, or it might be quite liturgical. You’re encouraging your viewer to think again and to read that tiny bit of text against the image, you’re creating this moment where [as a viewer] you thought you were looking at one thing, but now with this text beside it, you invite them to reconsider what they think they’re looking at?

Louise: I’m glad that comes across. That’s precisely it. They’re often just one word. It’s like the crop, as soon as you have two words, it becomes a sentence, and then you are verging on descriptions.

Jennifer: The crop and the condensed idea. Super interesting. Labels where you are just given facts shuts down the imagination. To me, that’s bad curating. Because what I want to do, and what the artist has done, is to open up possibilities. If you think a painting is about one thing, you're missing the point, and you clearly haven't done your 'slow looking!' [laughs]. 

Louise: There are no correct truths about my paintings or other artist’s paintings.

Simon: Louise, can you talk a little bit about the idea of the visuals and the title? I’m particularly interested in your work ‘Wager’ which features two gold shirts.

Louise: Wager, obviously is a bet or a gamble. I thought that would be a fitting title, because I was thinking a lot at that time about about gold the alchemy of gold, painting gold, the challenge and impossibility of that. The currency and value of gold throughout history and what it signifies. But I think what I've done in that painting is what I do in a lot of paintings, which is to propose something and then counter it. Shirts are like a smartening up thing, aren’t they? Attire that one would put on to elevate themselves socially. But then I've countered that with this use of gold, which is, supposed to be the highest value metal, and a signifier of wealth and high value. But to have it as a lamé shirt, it cuts through all of that, because there's a cheapening effect. I’m just interested in this, the cyclical idea of when does something valuable become gaudy or cheap? All of those questions. I was thinking about 1980s gameshow hosts. Who is this person who would wear a shirt like that? A shirt and gold are both symbols of wealth, but the two together don't work at all, or they kind of cancel each other out.

Jennifer: Contradictory!

Louise: Exactly!

Simon: Let’s discuss curtains and altarpieces. Louise, you have said that for you curtains literally set the scene while Jennifer you have said that altarpieces often play a specific role in a community, and are part of a broader decorative programme. Could you both talk a bit about these obsessions that seem quite omnipresent in both of your work?

Jennifer: I would say I am as equally obsessed with curtains as I am altarpieces [laughs]. I’m not sure if Louise is as obsessed with altarpieces!

Louise: Oh she is! But you should talk about altarpieces first.

Jennifer: Well, maybe it is handy that I happen to think about altarpieces and curtains together. Historically, many altarpieces in churches, particularly the Renaissance altarpieces that I write about, had curtains over them or had some sort of shuttering effect. Of course, in the north of Europe, works like the van Eyck had shutters that were also painted. So I think about curtains and veils a lot liturgical contexts. Unfortunately, no Renaissance curtains that covered altarpieces survive, but painted frescoes representing curtains drawn back over a polyptych exist, so we have both documentary evidence, and painted evidence of curtained altarpieces. When you teach the history of altarpieces, as I have for 10 years teaching an MA course at the National Gallery on the gallery floor, you make your students aware that what they are looking at are only fragments of a much bigger programme, and the same goes for the altarpieces in the Ashmolean. Visitors often don't understand that the works they are looking at are part of a larger whole, that these panels have been butchered and subsequently re-framed up to look like they were painted for a museum, but they weren’t. So I try and help people think about altarpieces in context and how their original viewers would have looked at them. It is like the pilgrimages you make Louise thinking about ‘what will the light be like?’ ‘What will the smells be?’ ‘Is there a mass going on?’

Historically, you might make your pilgrimage to see an altarpiece, and then it would be veiled and you couldn't see it. It would be a beautiful frustration. You might then attend mass, and at a key moment in the liturgy, the priest pulls back the curtain. Or it might be a certain feast day, and the the priest in a northern church would open up the altarpiece, usually painted black and white on the outer shutters, and it’s opened up, and ta-da! Colour! So it was all about drama. You would get the sense of an important revelation and that the revealed image was powerful and charged. This was obviously in a moment without television and in which most people didn't have paintings in their houses, unless they were exceptionally wealthy. So every week you would go and see this revelatory moment, so I tend to think about curtains in that way.

Curtains are also liturgically and symbolically important in Judaeo-Christian culture Curtains cover the Ark of the Covenant, the most sacred thing. They are mounted in the temple in Jerusalem, and then, in Christian tradition, the exact same curtains are believed to be rent, ripped in half, at the moment of Christ's Crucifixion, as they are no longer needed. It’s that shift from the Hebrew bible, the Old Testament into the New Testament. An altar cloth is also a veil, which is also a curtain. Once you start thinking about textiles in a religious context, there are many layered meanings.

It's all about revealing and concealing, and that charged image behind the veil. So, when I first saw Louise's paintings at White Cube [London] in 2022, in her ‘As If, Almost’ show it spoked to me.

Louise: I was thinking about the word ‘quasi’ at that time, which means, as if, almost but just to call it [the show] ‘quasi', I thought, no, lets keep the one word titles for the paintings and let the exhibition titles contain a few more.

I was thinking about the fact that these are fundamentally all paintings so it's as if something's happening, but not quite. You know, these moments of elevation, spiritual transcendence and ascension, because a lot of that show was about contemporary modes of worship and devotion. It had the curtains in, and it had pop stars and these sparkly, glittery, celebrity, jewelled moments.

You have mentioned a kind of frustration was that to do with the northern Renaissance panels closing, or was it the frustration of the actual curtain being drawn at the end of the mass?

Jennifer: It’s the visual frustration. If you come into a church to see a picture and there is a curtain covering it, was that exciting? Like the beginning of a play or performance, and the anticipation is there, and then you wait for ‘the moment.’ It's essentially about controlling how people experience an artwork.

As a curator, you are also manipulating from behind the scenes. As someone who stages temporary exhibitions, I think about how I want someone to encounter something, asking myself what's the narrative I want to share here? I want visitors to see that [art piece] first, and to keep it in their mind, because when they get to the next object, I hope it will all come together in their imagination. But I don’t want to reveal it all too soon. I often use temporary walls that you have to go around for that reason. I think about all of these kinds of ideas when I see Louise's work, it's all there.

Louise: It’s like engineering attention, isn't it? It's so fascinating to speak to you about this, because all I ever think about is people's attention. How do we change it? How do we navigate through it, or direct attention to the things that we want people to see? How is our attention directed?

I think about light a lot and going back to the paintings I made as part of that 2022 show, I was thinking entirely about light and about attention. How we don't realise it's happening but at pop concerts and theatre, cinema and television, we're being controlled through light.

Light is being shown on this celebrity whether it’s Mariah Carey, who I was painting at that time in a sparkly dress. We don’t think about this, but it's so religious! The impetus is the same. How we used to go to church and the spectacle of it - the Madonna lit up, the idea of the altar, the priest, the light shining through, the stained glass windows.

It's all for a reason. And we have the same needs as humans nowadays, we just don't realise that we do. But we flock to these concerts. We put the television on, we watch films. We want to be part of this performative spectacle. But coming back to that frustration thing, it's so fascinating how those panel paintings, how performative they were, how people would probably look forward to that one day a week where they could go and it would be revealed, but then closed again.

The question I'm asked all the time, as you might expect with the curtain paintings, is ‘what's behind the curtain?’ But I'm always thinking that's entirely wrong. It should be, ‘what is the curtain?’

Jennifer: I remember we had a mini chat about that in front of one of your curtains. And I was like, the curtain is the thing, it is the subject. It's so psychological. If you're always looking for what’s next you're missing the now. I think that’s what we're getting to, it’s what you've constructed. You've helped people see something that they don't really notice otherwise. I guarantee you, every single person who's seen your show is now seeing curtains everywhere, everywhere. [laughs]

Louise: [laughs]. People send them to me now, unsolicited, from all around the world. It is actually incredible, like people are seeing these curtains for the first time and that they’re everywhere. They're such a democratic thing. They come up in high culture, low culture. It’s funny when people say ‘oh that's a Louise Giovanelli.’ And I'm like ‘no, it's a curtain!’ It's fantastic!

Jennifer: But what you’ve helped [viewers of your work] to do, is to see.

Louise: I think people get frustrated because I never reveal. There’s no gap, there's no squint, and not just in the curtain paintings. In all of my work, I have noticed that all of the imagery is very pushed up against the surface of the canvas. There's no pictorial depth.

Jennifer: It’s like your pictures of hair, people want to see the figure’s face.

Louise: Or they want to see some context. Where is this? Is there a window? Is there a landscape? It's like a barrier, and I think that gets people a bit frustrated, hopefully in a strange but positive way.

Jennifer: It means it's working. If they didn't care and they walked right by, that's a failure.

Louise: If I did reveal any of that extra information, I just think it would become very boring, because it would become an illustration. And I think there's a difference between a painting and an illustration. You need some mystery. To keep you thinking and engaged in 'slow looking’, but also to keep your mind coming back. As you said, the best paintings you go back to over and over, and you think about them differently every time. You bring your own experience, your own mood, and you see it differently. It's a sign of a good picture. What’s the painting that you do that with?

Jennifer: Any painter who builds in that mystery are the ones that I particularly like. This is one of the reasons I really like your work you implicate viewers in a narrative or you encourage people to imagine one, a wider context beyond the limits of the canvas.

A Renaissance artist that was brilliant at doing that was Antonello da Messina. One of his genius works that I love is in Palermo, the Virgin Annunciate [c.1476]. If you know the history of art you might be able to recognise the subject but here the Virgin is just set against a black background, denying any kind of narrative or context and it's quite arresting. She’s looking at you and she's acknowledging you, and then, if you know your Christian iconography, you realise that you are in the position of the Archangel Gabriel, and you are in the position of delivering his message that she is with child. It’s the cropping, it's the closeness, it's almost life size, and it implicates you in the narrative, and you are compelled to kind of complete it! It’s a genius composition.

Any artist that can implicate you, draw you in, so that you activate the painting, as it were, which you do in front of your pictures, Louise. I think is brilliant.

Louise: That makes me think that not enough contemporary painters maybe consider the viewers ever. I always have, and I just think it's so important. Otherwise, it's just an entirely selfish act. You have to think about how these things are going to be encountered and looked at and you want people to look at them, and so you put yourself in the viewer's position. But I just see so much art where that's not the case.

Jennifer: It’s true. I've never even realised it until now.

Louise: But maybe these artists who don't do it, maybe they think that to do so would be to relinquish some sort of power? I hear that a lot where the artist feels their ideas are the best ideas, and they'll convey them however they want. If people want to look at them, then okay. And if they don’t, they won’t. But why not try to make everyone look?

Simon: Jennifer, you must tell us about the recent acquisition of the Fra Angelico Crucifixion at the Ashmolean.

Jennifer: It's a painting painted really early in his career. He would have been in his early 20s. First of all, as a curator, to be able to acquire works is extraordinary. Obviously, they're not for me they’re for the nation. The idea that this tremendous work will hopefully be hanging in the museum when I'm dust, and people will go on enjoying something that has already existed for centuries is so moving to me. It’s extraordinary that a work by this artist could even be discovered in our lifetimes! It’s not going to happen again. So that’s the geeky art historian stuff, but the picture itself is really beautiful. You see it in reproduction, and it looks quite conventional, but when you see it in person! And you really don’t have to be religious to find it completely moving because it just pulls you towards it. It motivated me to re-hang the whole room. The footfall in the room has definitely increased.

Louise: I can’t wait to come and see it.

Simon: It sounds amazing. An Oxford follow up pilgrimage for definite. Our time is nearly up but a question we ask all our guests is how would you define beauty?

Louise: I don't think you can define beauty. I think if I was to try to do that, it would be impossible, but I do think about it a lot. At the moment I’m reading some of Dave Hickey's [American art critic] work and that seemed to be his schtick for a long time. He used to call beauty ‘the B-word’ and I think it was quite scandalous at the time when he was giving these lectures and writing about beauty in the 1980s and 90s because it was considered the most uncool thing, or something you just weren’t meant to talk about in art.

But I think beauty, for me, is a way to kind of smuggle ideas in. It’s almost like a Trojan horse. Thinking back about the idea of audience and considering the viewers, I've always wanted to make my paintings beautiful, because by doing that you seduce people, and you can convey ideas, very difficult ideas, if you're able to do that in a beautiful way. No one is immune from what beauty, or what beautiful things can do to you. We are programmed to want to find beauty in every day life and in loads of different ways. We're programmed to need it to focus on it and to build our lives around beautiful things.

I think again, maybe the paintings I don't really like are ones that don't consider it. They don't want to make any of these aesthetic decisions, that would make a beautiful work. I don't know. It’s a really hard question. What I’m trying to say is, I think about it all the time, and I think it is the fundamental question, but I don't know how to define it, I guess because I'm trying to do it.

Jennifer: I’m glad you went first! I think beauty is the process, the fleeting thing that you're always seeking to capture. But of course, you know Louise, with deep, deep respect, that you'll never fully get to, but that's not the point. It's a bit like your curtain it’s about the curtain, not what’s behind the curtain.

Louise: It's almost like a means, beauty is the means, rather than the endpoint.

Jennifer: Exactly. I would answer in a similar sort of way. It goes back to all the things we've been talking about. It attracts you. It holds your attention. You sort of worry about it in a good way. You keep coming back to it. You might ask yourself why you keep thinking about it. That's why people say, it's in the eye of the beholder because we're all attracted by different things. We all might agree on some things that are beautiful, but it's the thing that we are attracted to that keeps pulling us back, that we keep wondering about. We keep asking ourselves, why am I still thinking about that leaf or the way the light hit that building? It touches something in us. It’s sort of subjective and changing all the time, but it can only ever be those things that we constantly want to come back to and we want more of, we want to think about more, we have to see again, experience again, but that are perhaps ephemeral as well.

We want more of, we want to think about more, we have to see again, experience again, but that are perhaps ephemeral as well.