Giulia Andreani’s gorgeous canvases speak with Madge Gill’s majestic 1936 piece, Crucifixion of the Soul, in the Central Pavilion of the Biennale Giardini.
The 2024 Venice Art Biennale is all about diversity and outsider artists. Curator Adriano Pedrosa grouped artists in twos and threes in each room, so that their art could build some constructive, intense conversation. One of the most beautiful rooms, and one of the better presented, too, is the last one at Padiglione Centrale. Giulia Andreani’s gorgeous canvases speak with Madge Gill’s majestic 1936 piece, Crucifixion of the Soul, a ten-metre-wide intense drawing on thin canvas made with four coloured pens: red, blue, green, and black. A cloth-like web giving life to white thin female faces, evanescent and tenuous, maybe a depiction of the artist’s guide spirit, which she calls Myrninerest. Madge Gill had quite the troubled life: an illegitimate child, her mother placed her in an orphanage at age nine.
Troubled life and tangled art facing off the refined, monochrome creations by Giulia Andreani, who homages Gill with a painting, Pour elles toutes (Myrninerest), portraying her pouring signs and colours into a rolled-up piece of paper. The subject, as is usual for Andreani, comes from a photograph depicting Gill and several women behind her sewing e making shoes. Giulia Andreani is the only Italian artist participating in the 2024 Venice Art Biennale, and sees Madge Gill as a standard-bearer of art brut. It is no coincidence that the opposite side of the Pavilion houses art by Aloïse, an artist who spent most of her life in a psychiatric hospital and was recognized by Dubuffet as the only woman representing Art Brut.
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