Artist: Giulia Andreani

Giulia Andreani paints the history of the voiceless: Inspired by the great struggles of the 20th century, the artist is showing her grey canvases at the Collezione Maramotti in Italy.

This is the image that captured my student's eye at the Biennale.

A composite image. Is this a way to handle the images and create an overall story in a large work?

Giulia Andreani (b. 1985) repurposes personal memorabilia and archival photographs through painting to address forgotten histories, often through a feminist lens.

Payne’s grey, a color invented by the 18th-century British landscape artist William Payne, is the only colour she uses. 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.

Painters she reveres: Luc Tuymans, Michaël Borremans, and above all Gerhard Richter.

‘I love rummaging through lesser-known archives, finding images that have not yet been digitized and that I can bring to light.’

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.’

Notes above taken from: 

• https://www.artbasel.com/stories/giulia-andreani-collezione-maramotti 
• https://www.maxhetzler.com/artists/giulia-andreani
• https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2024/nucleo-contemporaneo/giulia-andreani

The distancing effect, also translated as alienation effect is a concept in performing arts credited to German playwright Bertolt Brecht.

Brecht wanted to "distance" or to "alienate" his audience from the characters and the action and, by dint of that, render them observers who would not become involved in or to sympathize emotionally or to empathize by identifying individually with the characters psychologically; rather, he wanted the audience to understand intellectually the characters' dilemmas and the wrongdoing producing these dilemmas exposed in his dramatic plots. By being thus "distanced" emotionally from the characters and the action on stage, the audience could be able to reach such an intellectual level of understanding (or intellectual empathy); in theory, while alienated emotionally from the action and the characters, they would be empowered on an intellectual level both to analyze and perhaps even to try to change the world, which was Brecht's social and political goal as a playwright and the driving force behind his dramaturgy. - taken quickly from Wikipedia! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distancing_effect