Paola Angelini
Paola Angelini works within a lexicon of motifs inspired by 20th century statuary, Medieval tapestries, Italian art history, her own unconscious, and nature. She is interested in the symbolic value of her recurring motifs such as rearing horses, carved statues, dancers, and demons. She uses traditional materials such as rabbit skin glue and plaster to create an entirely unique surface texture that the artist calls “pictorial flesh”—alive with crevices, cracks, smoothness, and roughness. The figures within her paintings exist somewhere between the lively human world and the eternally static world of stone. Her focused color palettes in contrast with her historical themes create a tension between visual history, archive, and contemporaneity. In the universe of her paintings, time is collapsed as history seeps into our present moment.
Paola Angelini
The transformation of the heart into gold #1, 2025
Oil on canvas
79 x 63 inches, 200.7 x 160 cm
Paola Angelini, The transformation of the heart into gold #1 (Detail View)
Paola Angelini, The transformation of the heart into gold #1, Installation View in Devotions at Lyles & King, February 28 - April 5
Paola Angelini
The transformation of the heart into gold #2, 2025
Oil on canvas
77 3/4 x 70 1/2 inches, 197.5 x 179.1 cm
Paola Angelini, The transformation of the heart into gold #2 (Detail View)
Paola Angelini, The transformation of the heart into gold #2, Installation View in Devotions at Lyles & King, February 28 - April 5
Paola Angelini (b. 1983, San Benedetto del Tronto, IT) graduated from the Fine Arts Academy of Florence in 2010. In 2011, she attended the workshop of Visual Arts at IUAV University in Venice with Bjarne Melgaard, and in the same year she exhibited in the Norwegian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, in the exhibition entitled Baton Sinister. In 2017, Paola obtained a Master in Fine Arts at KASK Conservatorium in Gent (BE). In 2014 and 2016, she participated at the Artist in Residency program at Nordic Artists’Centre Dale (NKD), Norway. Selected exhibitions include: Forme del tempo, Museo Palazzo Pretorio, Prato, IT, 2017; La conquista dello spazio, Spazio K, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino, IT, 2017; Iconoclash, Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona, IT, 2017; Rethinking Media, Brandstrup Galleri, Oslo, NO, 2018; Babel of Bric a Bràc, BGE Gallery, Stavanger, NO 2019; Splendor Solis, Museo Ca’ Pesaro, Venice, IT, 2021 ; Black Morning, Lyles & King, New York, NY, 2022; and Il Tuffatore, Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza, IT, 2022. Angelini lives and works in San Benedetto del Tronto.