She has the air of an electric Madonna and is possessed with overwhelming talent, but describes herself with the devastating humor of a young mother as a ‘desperate house painter.’ Prolific, wildly loquacious, and unyielding in the face of adversity, Giulia Andreani is used to spinning plates. In her studio near Montmartre Cemetery, at the Villa des Arts, she is in constant motion, turning from her ever-expanding archives to her canvases to add finishing touches, then to the logistical details of her exhibition at the Collezione Maramotti in her native Italy’s Reggio Emilia, which opened October 29.
When we first met some ten years ago, Andreani was haunting an abandoned police station in the middle of a vacant lot in Montrouge in the Paris suburbs: her ‘witch’s house.’ Since then, her success has snowballed, with a proliferation of exhibitions and Max Hetzler making her a figurehead of his Parisian gallery. The young artist has kept her verve, and her cool, throughout. Her bluish grays envelop all sorts of scenes and figures in the northern light that filters through her glass roof; history comes to life beneath her brush. Indeed, she has made the struggles of the 20th century into the raw materials of her work. Payne’s grey, a color invented by the 18th-century British landscape artist William Payne, has become her signature. ‘It is a bluish gray with a bit of red and earth – the color of shadow and fog,’ she explains. ‘It is my way of staying connected to the images I use as source material, which are all in black and white. Color would be too loud in my work.’
The battles of the First World War, the resistance against fascism of all kinds, the Cold War, the ardors of feminism all fascinate her. She unearths images from disparate archives, then recomposes and reinvents them in her paintings, Andreani tells me in French. The artist also speaks German, English, and Spanish with such fluency that she nearly ended up in a school for interpreters – a fate she escaped by entering the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, even though no one in her family believed in her dream of becoming an artist. Hailing from Mestre, the industrial mainland suburb of La Serenissima, she loved living in Venice: ‘My school was right next to the Accademia, and I would go to see the Bellinis and Tintorettos every day,’ she recalls. ‘But I did not want to stay there. The city is a bit stuffy – not the most progressive of places. Good luck going out into the fog after feasting your eyes on Tintoretto!’ Breaking free from art history, she expanded and refined her knowledge of the Leipzig School, learning as much from her Russian, Serbian, and Croatian peers as from her ‘super macho professor from Calabria’. She goes onto add ‘I did not play the game in terms of being subservient, and pretty quickly found myself painting in a squat instead of at school.’ At a time when Arte Povera and Maurizio Cattelan reigned supreme, ‘we painters felt a bit like aliens.’
When she graduated in 2008, with her love of Berlin Dadaism (and Hannah Höch in particular), Andreani dreamed of continuing her studies in Germany, ‘the only country that didn’t see painters as lepers.’ In the end, love brought her to Paris, where she has been living for the past 15 years. At the Sorbonne, she embarked on a research project on Leipzig’s communist painters during the Cold War, began reading Jean-Luc Nancy and other French theorists, and immersed herself in the world of painters she reveres: Luc Tuymans, Michaël Borremans, and above all Gerhard Richter.
‘I wanted to understand this contemporary rejection of figurative painting. I had to find reasons to make figurative work today.’ Figurative painting was said to be ‘right-wing, regressive’ – she was told, ‘you can’t be both a feminist and a painter.’ All around her, the worst clichés were being bandied about. But with her knowledge of cultural studies and the history of conceptual art, she patiently deconstructed them, persuaded that ‘every work of art is political. I do not run into these preconceptions as often, nowadays, but I still take part in the intellectual debate, otherwise my work would have no reason to exist. What does figurative even mean? There are a thousand ways to do figuration. It is very important not to do what is expected of you, otherwise you become a commodity.’
And now, here she is, a painter of history. But not just any history – a history of those rendered invisible, of the proletariat, the voiceless. With each exhibition, each residency, she dives into archives: from the Musée de la Résistance nationale in Champigny-sur-Marne to the Villa Medici in Rome. ‘I love rummaging through lesser-known archives, finding images that have not yet been digitized and that I can bring to light.’ Given carte blanche at the Collezione Maramotti, she immersed herself in the local history of the region around Bologna. It was an ‘immense’ undertaking, and of particular import as this solo show marks her big return to Italy ‘after twenty years of Berlusconi squashing people’s brains.’
Searching through the image collection of the fashion company Max Mara, whose founder established the art center, Andreani came across a photograph from the 1940s that stood out to her. It was taken in a dressmakers’ school also created by the company’s founder. The face of one of the young girls in the photo – the only one to look into the camera’s lens – inspired the artist to create a portrait that is ‘a little Mona Lisa, a little satanic. She is l’improduttiva, the unproductive one, which gives my exhibition its title.’ Andreani also happened upon books that mention a local psychiatric hospital, from which other silhouettes emerge onto her canvases, such as a little girl bound to her chair. She also explored the archives of Istoreco, an association collecting documentation relating to the anti-fascist resistance in the Po Valley, unearthing blue-collar family photo albums, union leaflets, and anarchist magazines. ‘So little attention has been paid to this chapter in our history, here in Italy. Holding these documents in my hands was intensely emotional for me, awakening the specter of family history. We carry these things in the very cells that make up our bodies.’
Then began the process of digesting all variety of iconographic sources ‘that needed to be reorganized and then thought out in painting, to take them beyond mere historical reconstruction.’ The artist found a guide through this historical maze in the playwright Bertolt Brecht, drawing on his concept of distancing. ‘Pathos is very Italian – it envelops the viewer in something very toxic, so I need this Verfremdung, this critical distancing Brecht proposes.’ Finally, there comes the ‘montage’, when Andreani collages all of these histories together to create sweeping compositions sometimes three of four meters long, like the work she made in the spring for an exhibition using Condé Nast’s photographic archives at Palazzo Grassi in Venice. ‘The montage phase is torturous for me,’ she says, ‘I go into this uchronic dimension where historical perspective gets a little lost and the archives mix together in a paradoxical jumble. Painting allows me to simultaneously digest and spit all of that back out.’
Giulia Andreani is represented by Galerie Max Hetzler (Berlin, London, Paris).
Emmanuelle Lequeux is a writer based in Paris.
'L'improduttiva'
Until March 10, 2024
Collezione Maramotti
Reggio Emilia (Italy)
English translation: Jacob Bromberg.
Caption for full-bleed image: 'L'improduttiva' at Collezione Maramotti. © Giulia Andreani - Adagp, Paris, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler. Photograph by Dario Lasagni. 2. 'Fabulation', 2023. © Giulia Andreani - Adagp, Paris - Palazzo Grassi, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler. Installation view, 'Chronorama Redux' at Palazzo Grassi, 2023. Photograph by Marco Cappelletti.
Published on November 7, 2023.