L'improduttiva / The Unproductive One

Giulia Andreani is an Italian painter born in Venice in 1985 who now lives in Paris. Andreani's work grows out of collective memories, fragments of history at risk of being lost, which the artist recovers and transforms into complex pictorial compositions, visual collages constructed through correspondences. Archives, and the pre-digital objects they hold, are her primary source of inspiration: faded letters, yellowed documents, and above all, black-and white-photographs that the artist selects, gathers and filters in a non-linear way, sifting out their key elements. Andreani's work is guided by an unorthodox approach to research, in which images of the past are absorbed and transformed by her artistic subjectivity. It reveals invisible figures and forgotten facts, places, and moments, most of which are indissolubly linked to the historical, social and cultural experience of the female gender. In many of her works, Andreani—who calls herself a feminist painter/researcher—raises questions about how women have been seen and represented in different eras, pointing out the underlying power dynamics and dismantling gender stereotypes. Her practice of "painting with photographs" is fuelled by a mixture of latent tensions and figures from the past, brought back to life as sentinels of the present.