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Ilaria Maria Sala

China is having a Louise Giovanelli moment.
Two concurrent solo shows of the Manchester-based British artist have just opened: one in Hong Kong and one at the He Art Museum in Foshan – the private museum in China’s Guangdong province owned by the family behind electronics giant Midea.
In 2025, the artist will hold another solo show at Tank Shanghai, collector Qiao Zhibing’s private museum.
Her show at White Cube Hong Kong, called “Here On Earth”, includes a new series of dramatic images featuring a dominant palette of what Giovanelli calls “sickly” green that are both seductive and unsettling.

First, the exhibition opens with a large canvas depicting closed theatre curtains, so meticulously rendered you want to reach out and touch the fabric. The green curtains are tempered by a deep yellow and a pinkish-orange that resemble the reflection of stage lights on a shimmering material. It literally sets the stage for what visitors are going to see afterwards.
This is one of Giovanelli’s recurrent habits: to start shows with different versions of her “Curtain” series as dramatic introduction.
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It takes the viewer across a threshold – on one side, the world and all its cares. On the other side, a visual storytelling adventure.
The artist says she is particularly interested in revealing borders, margins and “in-between places” through her paintings. This can be seen not just in her “Curtains” but also in the new series, titled “Maenad”.
The name refers to the female followers of Dionysus – the god of wine, fertility and ecstasy, also known as Bacchus, in ancient Greek myths. These women, also referred to in Roman tradition as the Bacchantes or maenads, pursued physical and mental ecstasy amid total freedom.

Each of Giovanelli’s paintings features a larger portrait of a woman in the background that is partly concealed by a smaller portrait superimposed on top.
Visitors are told that the images are taken from scenes from 1980s films in which a woman – seen with eyes closed, mouth open – is in a state of enthrallment, and it is left to the viewer to guess whether it is because of physical pleasure, mystical abandonment or something else. (In fact, the images are all from porn films.)
The ambiguity between religious and sexual ecstasy has been addressed by generations of artists – one immediately thinks of the Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s altarpiece Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.
Giovanelli says she addresses this fine line, too. “I’m interested in altered states, and in worship as both possession and ecstasy.”

In fact, that “sickly” green she uses for the portraits comes from the inspiration of pre-Renaissance Italian painters such as Duccio, Cimabue and Simone Martini, she says. They often painted faces green to express sickness or sin.
Health and salvation, the main promises made by many religious faiths, are portrayed by these ancient artists as a slow progress from a green skin tone to a more natural one, as the characters in the painting get closer to the divine.
Her “Maenad” paintings, then, talk about an in-between state amplified by having two different frames from the same film sequence appearing on the same canvas, the smaller portrait on top of a larger one.

For viewers, the beautiful, green-hued women are experiencing something that could be orgasmic or religious, “an altered state that we can’t tangibly touch”, Giovanelli says.
The dislocation of one portrait on top of the other forces us to look for a few minutes longer than we would for a single image: we are aware of witnessing a moment of great intimacy, but this voyeurism is tempered by the surprise of the unnatural sickly colour of the women we stare at.
The show at the He Art Museum, which is a retrospective of Giovanelli’s works from the past five years, gives a different take on her practice. What it interrogates is not so much the ambiguity between different kinds of ecstasies but her exploration of the intersection between painting, drawing and the various influences – from Renaissance masters to pop culture – that inform her practice.

“Louise’s paintings have the magic of time standing still, and they break the boundaries between time and culture,” says Dan Qiao of Tank Shanghai, where Giovanelli will hold her 2025 show. “[They also offer] a strong spirit of British underground culture.”
This trait is clearly seen in the White Cube show, with its transgressive mixing of sacred and profane ecstasies. But that’s all Qiao will divulge of the 2025 show, with Giovanelli still working on the new paintings that she will take to Shanghai.
“Louise Giovanelli: Here on Earth”, White Cube Hong Kong, 50 Connaught Road Central, Central, Tue-Sat, 11am-7pm. Until May 18.


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A work from Louise Giovanelli’s 2023 series “Maenad”. The British artist is currently holding a solo exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong, as well as a retrospective in mainland China. Photo: Louise Giovanelli

Louise Giovanelli in her Manchester studio. Photo: White Cube

A work from Giovanelli’s new series “Maenad”. Photo: Louise Giovanelli

Harmony (2024), by Louise Giovanelli. Photo: Louise Giovanelli

Supra (2024), by Louise Giovanelli. Photo: Grimm Gallery

Installation view of Giovanelli’s exhibition at the He Art Museum in Foshan. Photo: Grimm Gallery

Michelangelo’s David vs Goliath battle against those seen to debase the masterpiece’s image inspires wider resistance

A souvenir bag shows Michelangelo’s David blowing a gum bubble among other souvenirs in a shop in Florence, Italy, on March 18, 2024. Legal efforts to restrict vendors from debasing the statue’s image have prompted debate across Italy about restrictions on freedom of expression. Photo: AP

Souvenirs of Michelangelo’s David on sale in a shop in downtown Florence. Photo: AP

Michelangelo’s David on display at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence. Photo: AP

Souvenirs of Michelangelo’s David on sale in Florence. Photo: AP

Souvenirs of Michelangelo’s David among others on sale in Florence. Photo: AP

‘Material realities’: German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ unedited views of the world on display in Hong Kong show

Wolfgang Tillmans with his artwork Lunar Landscape, part of The Point Is Matter at David Zwirner gallery in Central, his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong in six years. “What runs through this exhibition is a deep interest in the matter of things: this shirt, this branch, this leaf, this roadside, this ocean surface,” he says. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Artist Wolfgang Tillmans in front of his video installation Four Videos of Build From Here at David Zwirner in Central, Hong Kong. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Window Left Open (2023) by Wolfgang Tillmans. Photo: David Zwirner

Sirius Through a Defocused Telescope, f (2023) by Wolfgang Tillmans. Photo: David Zwirner

Badehose, photocopy II (1994) by Wolfgang Tillmans. Photo: David Zwirner

Artist Wolfgang Tillmans in front of his photograph HKG Airport Interior (2023), which shows a glitch on a screen at Hong Kong International Airport. He saw it as a moment of authenticity to be preserved. Photo: Mustafah Abdulaziz

Ulaanbaatar Still Life (2023) by Wolfgang Tillmans, an example of the photographer turning the mundane into a compelling image. Photo: David Zwirner

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Arts & Culture

Louise Giovanelli’s exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong includes a new series of dramatic, voyeuristic images tempered by their unnatural sickly colour
Her concurrent show at mainland China’s He Art Museum is a retrospective of her works from the past five years and offers a different take on her practice


British artist Louise Giovanelli’s Hong Kong exhibition includes a new series of portraits featuring ‘sickly’ green-hued women in the throes of ecstasy, but is it orgasmic, religious or other pleasure?


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