In a film made to accompany her current exhibition, 'Song of Ascents' at the Hepworth Wakefield, Louise Giovanelli says that 'Curtains for me are just endlessly fascinating, I think because they are so steeped in tradition'.

The painter is well known for her hyperreal draped depictions and this exhibition includes four new curtain works which draw on working men's clubs as much as Renaissance paintings. In fact, the show makes clear Giovanelli's love of high and low culture, of the sacred and profane.

The symbolic force of curtains comes from their ability to both conceal and unveil, to simultaneously exclude and promise entry. Giovanelli exploits this theatrical ambiguity, the sense that the performance has ended or is yet to start. This suggestion of a pause in action holds us in a suspended moment and asks us to look closely.

Giovanelli also invites the viewer to be attentive to the history of paint and its claims to realistically render an object. Curtains and drapes are everywhere in art history, with highly realistic, sculptural folds found in Northern Renaissance paintings and as illusionary devices in Dutch trompe l'oeil. It's hard to not see Van Eyck's green folds in Giovanelli's Prairie (2022).

2022 oil on linen by Louise Giovanelli (b.1993)

Portrait of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and his Wife

Born in London in 1993, Giovanelli was raised in the Welsh town of Monmouth. She moved to Manchester in 2015 to complete her BA in Fine Art at the Manchester School of Art, followed by an MA in 2020 at the Städelschule in Frankfurt Am Main, Germany.

Her rise has been quick: a solo exhibition at the Manchester Art Gallery in 2019 was followed by her inclusion in the Hayward Gallery's exhibition 'Mixing It Up: Painting Today'. She joined White Cube's roster in 2022 with a debut show that year and another at their Hong Kong outpost in early 2024. The Hepworth display is her largest solo show to date.

Giovanelli's interest in the fabric of the Old Masters betrays her wider mining of the history of art. The side profile of the boy in Dress Rehearsal II conjures the half-length portrait popular in the Renaissance, while another early work, Ambia I, part of a series depicting darkly coloured acanthus leaves, is inspired by the formal qualities of classical sculpture.

The stylised nature of the acanthus made it a popular decorative architectural motif first used in ancient Greece. Yet the scrawled white lines across Giovanelli's image suggest an interruption, further adding to her examination of the work's own materiality.

Ambia I was included in her breakthrough show at Manchester Art Gallery, where new works were shown alongside early Renaissance panel paintings of saints and icons from the gallery's collection, including The Crucifixion.

Her interrogation of the silky surface of these rare panels, built up using thin layers of paint, can be seen in works such as Marker V (2019), which similarly attempts a smooth finish despite being continuously worked.

But this work takes as its starting point an image of a modern icon, highlighting how Giovanelli's practice is rooted in more recent history and is alert to different forms of contemporary worship. The close-up detail of a neck and chin is borrowed from a 1962 photograph of film star Elizabeth Taylor, in which she was depicted as the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. The eye is drawn to a blemish on Taylor's neck, a scar that resulted from a tracheotomy. In another series, titled Orbiter (2021), she blows-up pop star Mariah Carey's legs.

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This is how Giovanelli works, by taking a found image – photographs, film stills – and zooming in on a detail such as a neck, collar, hair, or wine glass (these works reference both Caravaggio's Bacchus and the character Patsy Stone from Absolutely Fabulous). Writing in Tate Etc magazine, for a piece about the importance of Walter Sickert, she says that Sickert's use of appropriated photographic sources – Variation on Peggy, for example, draws on a black and white photograph of actress Peggy Ashton – 'is familiar territory to me'.

This forensic approach to images, and their use as a preliminary tool, enables Giovanelli '...to reconfigure and reappraise. I am effectively using painting as a camera, drawing attention to details that would otherwise be overlooked.' Removed from their original contexts, these images take on an unfamiliar, eerie quality.

The Hepworth exhibition includes the 2023 work Entheogen, which depicts a woman with her mouth open and eyes closed, in a state of either reverie or pain, the canvas coated in an almost neon green glow. Having grown up a Catholic, Giovanelli is interested in religious imagery, and here she explores the links between spiritual devotion and physical ecstasy.

Soothsay (2023) quite literally expands on Entheogen by blowing up the disembodied, wide-open mouth, an orifice that is the gateway to much bodily sensation. By focusing tightly on this image, Giovanelli removes it so far from its source that it becomes emblematic of the shared experiences at the heart of religious or hedonistic intoxication.

2023, oil on paper by Louise Giovanelli (b.1993)

The Maenad series (2023–2024), which is based on film stills from the 1980s and whose title references the female followers of Dionysus, God of pleasure, also depicts open-mouthed women, eyes closed, hands clasped in arousal or prayer. Riffing on one image is a way for the artist to look at it again, to rework and perhaps discover something anew. But this method, which involves doubling or repeating an image, also reveals the deliberate manipulation of her source material – as well as the all-pervasive nature of the digital world.

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Giovanelli's centring of female subjects is clear in other works, including a couple which take as their starting point Brian De Palma's 1976 horror film Carrie. The first, Auto-da-Fé (2021), shows the moment the titular heroine is crowned prom queen; the second, Altar (2022), after she is covered in pig's blood. The distorted face of Altar, reminiscent of Francis Bacon's twisted portraits, its mouth agape and draped in what appear to be twinkly coloured lights, has a horror all of its own.

2021, oil on canvas by Louise Giovanelli (b.1993)

Giovanelli's own heady ascent reflects the broader interest in figurative painting in recent years, as well as the rise of Manchester as an alternative artistic centre. Based in a studio in a former tram depot in Ardwick, Giovanelli has spoken candidly about the difficulties of working and finding affordable space in London. Now she is part of a group of painters dubbed the 'Ardwick Realists' who all work from this estate and who are at the forefront of contemporary British – northern – painting.

While Giovanelli's art is rooted in the Old Masters, it is nevertheless thoroughly of its time: for a start, she often uses her iPhone to capture and crop the close-up details of the images that she later references. Her filtering of images, as well as their frequently seductive, glittery surface, also points to the digital manipulation of so many contemporary images and to the pervasive, quasi-religious worship of technology in today's society.

Imelda Barnard, Commissioning Editor, modern and contemporary British art at Art UK

'Louise Giovanelli: Song of Ascents' is at Hepworth Wakefield until 21st April 2025

This content was supported by Jerwood Foundation