There’s a painting at the heart of From Here To Here To Here, part way through a decade of Louise Giovanelli’s collected works, and it looks a lot like Blackpool.

Light glistens across the liquid gold of a sequinned dress, dancing itself dizzy, at once a performer at the town’s celebrated burlesque Funny Girls and the illuminations made flesh. At first sight, it seems imbued with the timeless radiance of the Tower Ballroom, but closer inspection reveals the cracks in its surface, flaws which only accentuate its hard-won beauty.

It’s a glorious piece of art, oil alchemised into photons, and one which effectively closes the circle of an association between Giovanelli and the Grundy Art Gallery that dates back to her first solo exhibition there in 2016. Works from that show, set among other early pieces, open this part retrospective, looking in hindsight like auguries of her current renown.

Giovanelli’s technical gifts, exemplified particularly well by the soft focus portraiture of 2016’s attentively illustrative The Dress Rehearsal, have never have been in doubt. Nevertheless, it’s to the credit of curator Paulette Brien that, in the attention to detail that marks out Giovanelli’s earlier pieces, she was able to discern a growing distinctiveness in the artist’s voice; in that restless curiosity, the seeds of the somethings that would come to set her apart. Pieces such as Swan in which a single arm, lit an uncanny post-mortem blue, drapes across a naked torso, demonstrates a facility for composed imprecision which she has yet to return to, whereas, in Underglow, the first threads of a fascination with the folds and textures of fabrics can be clearly discerned.

Between the first and second rooms of the gallery, between the early and the more recent works, something shifts. It’s as though – with the suddenness of epiphany – Giovanelli has seen the light.

The jump between Underglow and Prairie, for example, is quantum. Whereas the former is hemmed in by edging, darker lines of paint which differentiate figure from ground, clothing from carpet, in the latter Giovanelli trusts the paint to catch the fall of the curtains, the subtle shifts of shade through which they are sculpted. Casting aside the safety net of the artificially-imposed outline, she takes a leap of faith into her own ability.

As her ambitions take on a larger scale, so too do the size of her canvases. Giovanelli’s interest in the doubling of an image, dating back to early paintings such as Beard III and Beard IV, is transferred onto a wider screen with Wager in which a pair of shirts the colour of Martin Fry’s jacket seem latent with the capacity for scintillation.

The metaphor of the big screen, moreover, is an apt one. The figurative paintings from this period, often derived from film stills, have something of the quality of celluloid projected into a flickering, dust-flecked imitation of life. 2023’s Entheogen, for example, intimates something far more ambiguous in a young woman’s passive acceptance of a communion wafer, even while she is seemingly lit from within like a study from the lives of the saints.

Naturally, the story does not end there. In another turn of the circle, Giovanelli, along with fellow painter Dr Ian Harsthorne and curator Alice Amato, co-founded the Apollo Painting School in 2023 with the aim of cementing skills development in artists setting out on their vocation. The exhibition rounds off with a room affording wall space to a selection of its recent graduates, implicitly inviting the question as to which of them will be completing their own circle in ten years’ time.

Inside and outside the Grundy, casting aside the overcast, Blackpool is putting on its lippy and squeezing into its glad rags. Louise Giovanelli, several months early, has switched on the illuminations.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Louise Giovanelli, The Hand Refrains. Photo: Simon Pantling. Courtesy Private Collection. Copyright 2026, Louise Giovanelli, Courtesy of the Artist and GRIMM, Amsterdam, New York, London. All Rights Reserved, DACS. Produced in response to Grundy Art Gallery Collection.

     

From Here To Here To Here is at Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool until June 28, 2026. For more information, click here.