Steve Smith

There is no other person in sight when I show up at the Maple industrial estate in Ardwick, Manchester. The sprawling, red-bricked complex has the air of an army barracks or an airport hangar. Doors are shuttered, the grass is overgrown, and discarded car parts line the perimeter. It’s also freezing. “Everyone struggles with directions to get here,” says Louise Giovanelli, when she eventually finds me walking in circles outside. The British artist is dressed in black jeans and a black hoodie flecked with paint. As I follow her through a network of tunnels, I feel like we’re about to attend a secret partisan meeting, rather than enter her studio.

But there is a cause being championed here today: the north – and, more specifically, Manchester. The 31-year-old, one of the most talked-about artists of her generation, is at the forefront of a new movement of painters who refuse to bow to industry pressure and relocate to London. A number of them – recently dubbed the “Ardwick Realists” – work together out of this same estate.

“I’ve made Manchester my home,” says Giovanelli as we settle down in a high-ceilinged, spacious room flanked by her outsized canvases. In an adjacent kitchen, pots, pans and coffee mugs sit drying on racks. “It’s a fantastic city. And I can get this …” She gestures at what is all around us. “This doesn’t exist in London. But the fact that I am where I am today still amazes me, because I’ve had a ton of resistance.”

That includes a blue-chip gallery once warning Giovanelli that it would be too hard for them to bring collectors to the “grim north” to view her work. More fool them, because her career has been meteoric. Her first break was a solo show at the Manchester Art Gallery. Two years later, she was included in a survey of contemporary painting at the Hayward in London, then joined the leading White Cube gallery. The latest milestone is her largest solo exhibition to date: A Song of Ascents, which is at the Hepworth Wakefield until April.

Sitting in her studio, it’s difficult not to be drawn into Giovanelli’s oil paintings. They are vivid, bold and beautiful, depicting ephemeral moments and sensual textures like soft ribboned curls of hair, lame shirts and draperies. Her work is an amalgamation of influences, from the pomp and ceremony of religion to the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Giovanelli says she takes “a macrocosmic view” of the world. “I’m interested in spirituality and religion and art history, but I’m also very interested in contemporary culture. I started to draw connections between the two, because I realised, as human beings, we still need the same things we needed back then.” This led her to explore “contemporary modes of devotion”: the way the veneration of religious icons like the Madonna and Child has metamorphosed into a fixation with celebrity and fame; how Instagram and TikTok have replaced churches to become this generation’s shrines. “All that’s happened is that worship has been translated to, like, a Mariah Carey concert, or who’s that really famous one at the moment?”

Taylor Swift? I offer. “Exactly,” she says.

Giovanelli was born in London and grew up in Monmouth, Wales. She didn’t come from an artistic background – her Irish mother was a nurse, her Italian father a building surveyor. But as a child, she was always creative, and eventually opted to study art in Manchester and later at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. During her studies in Germany, Giovanelli discovered that painting was considered “the most uncool” medium an artist could pursue. The industry was still running on the fumes of artists like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, who crashed the 1990s art scene with their shock tactics and conceptual works.

Giovanelli decided to stick to her guns, though, and do what came most naturally to her. Now, with the recent swing towards figurative painting, she feels vindicated. So is painting cool again? “Definitely. If you’re authentic, people will eventually pay attention. Now I see so many people’s works and I’m like, ‘That’s literally my painting!’ I’m flattered, because it feels like the tables have turned.”

The title of the new show is taken from a Catholic psalm. It is also a reference to Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, a letter written during the writer’s imprisonment in Reading Gaol to his former lover, in which he charts his spiritual development. Although she now regards herself as an atheist, Giovanelli says her Catholic upbringing (she went to church every Sunday) has imbued her with “a great reverie for religion and all of the rituals that go with it”. Similarly, she says, Wilde “was never a believer but he respected the act of faith, and he saw faith in all aspects of life”.

If Wilde’s characters and customs blurred the line between the sacred and the profane, then Giovanelli’s paintings are an extension of that. The exhibition features a number of closely cropped female faces with thrown back heads and gasping mouths. They are intentionally oblique and mysterious: she wants viewers to wonder if the figures are in turmoil or ecstasy. “There are,” she says, “so many instances of that in art history, like Michelangelo’s Pieta or Bernini’s St Teresa.”

Among the works are two paintings based on Brian De Palma’s horror classic Carrie, about a high school outcast who wreaks vengeance on her bullies. The first depicts the moment Carrie, played by Sissy Spacek, is crowned prom queen; the second is the immediate aftermath of her being drenched with pig’s blood by the popular kids.

Then there’s Entheogen, a painting based on French 1971 horror film Don’t Deliver Us from Evil. “There’s a scene where a woman is receiving the Eucharist. But I’ve cropped the image – you just see a woman with her mouth open and her eyes shut. It’s funny: depending on who’s viewing the works, they can either see the complete innocence of them, or they’ll see the opposite. My mum, who’s quite Catholic, saw the Eucharist. And other people are like, ‘That’s just porn.’”

But it’s not just religious iconography that fascinates Giovanelli. The artist is also known for her large-scale depictions of drapes and curtains, and the exhibition includes four specially commissioned paintings on this theme. The works are bold, colourful and hyper-realist, with resemblances to northern Renaissance painting, the luminosity and textures of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. The curtains, she says, were inspired by photographs of local community theatres and working men’s clubs. Some evoke an atmosphere of opulence, others the promise of cheap beer and a karaoke machine.

“I’m endlessly fascinated with curtains and their connotations,” Giovanelli says. “I like what they signal to people. In working men’s clubs, they give opportunity to people who ordinarily wouldn’t be able to perform on a stage. Anyone can have their time to shine, and I think that’s fantastic. There’s also an ambiguity to curtains, are they opening or closing? Has the action happened already, or is it going to?”