Louise Giovanelli Media Luna 2026

Louise Giovanelli’s longstanding fascination with light and hair finds luminous expression in Media Luna, a 14-colour screenprint commissioned by the Government Art Collection. Built up through layers of colour, each print is finished with high-gloss spot varnish and individually embellished with the artist’s hand-painted details, introducing subtle variations that render each print unique.

Drawing on paintings, photographs, film and classical sculpture, Giovanelli frequently reworks and closely crops existing imagery, often employing repetition to produce an augmented sense of reality. Media Luna continues this tradition, returning to hair, one of the artist’s signature motifs, and extending a series that includes works such as Plexus, Axis and Equator.

For Media Luna, Giovanelli revisited a blonde wig she had previously used as source material for a group of paintings. Photographing the wig under coloured lights, she subjected the resulting image to a series of transformations: flipping, rotating and doubling it before projecting the image onto a wall in her Manchester studio and photographing it again. Strips of tape and cellophane applied to the wall further distorted the projection, introducing glints and refracted highlights that accentuate its artificiality and evoke the grain and flicker of film.

To translate these effects into print, Giovanelli worked with Gregory Day at Worton Hall Studios. Successive layers of colour were applied to build complexity, echoing the artist’s practice of developing colour in oil paint through translucent glazes. A stencil layer of high-gloss varnish introduces reflective passages that appear and recede as the viewer changes position, drawing attention to the print’s physical surface while heightening the illusion of pictorial depth. Giovanelli then painted additional strands of hair and highlights by hand, introducing subtle variations between the prints.

The title, Media Luna, meaning ‘half-moon’ or ‘crescent moon’ in Spanish, extends the cosmic vocabulary through which Giovanelli has explored the motif of hair. In earlier works, the central parting of the hair is treated as a natural division, akin to the Earth’s equator, with the head imagined as a centre of rotation and orbit. Here, shifting reflections and distorted forms suggest the changing phases of the moon, transforming hair into a site of reflection, anonymity and drama.

Established in 1899, the Government Art Collection is a national collection of historic, modern and contemporary British art. Alongside its collecting activity and the display of works in government buildings, the Collection works with partners across the UK to bring art into communities and to support creative exchange and skills development for young people.

Of the 30 prints in this edition, only ten are available for sale. Proceeds from these sales will support future acquisitions by the Government Art Collection, with particular emphasis on work by emerging artists and those currently under-represented in the Collection.