WOULD YOU LOVE TO LOVE HER Painting

GG started drawing at a very early age, she would sit down and draw for hours; fragments of fantasy and symbols of her inner world poured onto the first pages of her artistic story. She was eight years old when she was awarded the first prize at a local street contest in her hometown of Amsterdam. Italian blood also runs through her veins and so Naples became the next location of her colorful upbringing. Here, amidst the sacred and profane exuberance of southern Italy, she attends the first art school and learns to use the fundamental instruments of the trade. Meanwhile, her youth was enriched with regular travels to South America (where her father lives) and visits to the powerfully archaic world of the Indios. Her current work is still filled with recurring evocations of these magical cultures, where exotic and cheeky animals with Indian and African origins accompany the prevalently female protagonists of her work. The universe they encounter is also streaked with pictorial emotions, states of mind, fundamental themes of loss, love and pain. Strands of childhood, family and past relationships weave their colorful webs into the picture of her soul. GG’ s adult life has thus far been spent in Amsterdam, Rotterdam (where she graduated from the Art & Design Academy), and Milan where she won a scholarship and experienced the world of independent fashion design. She has lived and operated in the Western world, and yet, her canvases express a beloved fusion of ethnicities and virginal cultures tarnished by our consumer society. Thus, memories of Indigenous Goddess-like characters and antique South American elements are fused with the commercial sensuality of our contemporary “instagrammed” lives. The artist’s childlike quality clashes violently with the ingrained objectification processes of our consumer existence. Her figures are endowed with large eyes to better devour the world of external images we live in. They also sport luscious and sensual lips for the sensory experiences which we, as children of “fast art”, constantly crave. This is the contemporary evidence which the artist cannot help absorbing and commenting upon. Yet, a subterranean world of words and philosophical thought pushes through the chatter, dares to reveal the intellect. Poetry is fluently incorporated in her paintings. Letters are worn like meaningful jewels within the wild locks of her female figures.