Giulia Ley
b.1999
Lives and Works in London
Giulia Ley lives and works in London. She is a multi-disciplinary artist who graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2023. Captivated by what she believes to be the undeniable and universal appeal of things in miniature, her work begins with the selection of dolls that she finds have a certain je ne sais quoi. Sometimes, they are stripped down (hair or clothes removed) in order to saturate their evocative potential. In her most recent body of work, shown at Fairytale Ambitions (2024) she has been interested in how the reverential nature of photography endows these objects with a sort of humanity, capturing them from angles in which, from afar they might appear indistinguishable from a real person. The dolls are apprehended in moments of reverie, and introspection; they become characters from books, films, and perfume adverts.The figures are precariously convincing, which to Giulia speaks to painting. Dolls and paintings are at once vessels and solid matter, constrained by their own materiality. Ephemeral, they oscillate between being and non-being: sometimes a human, sometimes a compound of red and white.
‘He was drawing a man who was in a fit of anger... The paper with the abandoned drawing... was dirty and spotted with candle grease... [which] had given the figure a new pose. He was drawing this new pose when suddenly he recol- lected the vigorous face with a prominent chin of a shopkeeper from whom he bought cigars, and he gave that same face and chin to the man he was drawing. He laughed with delight. Instead of being dead and contrived, the figure he was drawing suddenly became alive, and such that it could no longer be altered.’
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
- Education
- 2020-2023Slade School of Fine Art
- 2018-2019Kingston School of Fine Art
- Works
