Giusy Lauriola was born in Rome, where she lives and works.
She graduated with honours in Modern Foreign Languages and Literature at the Sapienza University in Rome. But languages are not her real passion. She started working in the communication sector in a large Italian company, got married and gave birth to her two children, Marco and Sofia. At the same time, she attended a painting and drawing course at the San Giacomo Art and Craft in Rome and followed the painting courses of two masters, Silvio Bicchi, whose father was a pupil of the great Giovanni Fattori, the greatest exponent of the Macchiaioli, and Alberto Bertuzzi, who taught her the hyper realist technique. In 2003, the turning point in her life, a difficult choice. After 10 years, she gave up work for good to devote herself exclusively and professionally to her true passion: painting. As James Hillman wisely wrote in his enlightening text The Soul’s Code “…The eye of necessity reveals that what we do is only what could have been”.
To refine her stroke, she followed the illustration course at the Pencil Art School of Comics and Illustration in Rome.
Since 2004 she has had successful exhibitions in Italy and abroad, the mostrecent of which are in 2023 – Close your eyes, Aranciera di San Sisto, Rome and Artètika, Palermo (solo exhibition); in 2022 – We take the swampy path to the clouds, Galleria Umberto Mastroianni in San Salvatore in Lauro Museum, Rome (solo exhibition); participation in the International SyArt Sorrento Festival, Villa Fiorentino, Sorrento Foundation; illustrations for the publishing project Guido Levi, a story full of fears, anxieties and almost yellow events 1942-1946; in 2019 Domino/ Domination for fun and for real, MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome.
“Art, for me,” writes Lauriola, “represents immersing myself in inner journeys, in that magical silence made up of the absence of space and time necessary to then give form and colour to images that, filtered by emotions, live a metaphysical dimension that seeks a representation. A need I had since I was a child when I would hide under the living room table and start drawing, cutting, gluing: what I now do in my studio! Despite the fact that my parents claimed that I had a special talent as a child: left alone in an empty room I could always create something, they never accepted that I could enrol in art school or the Academy of Fine Arts. They wanted me to study biochemistry at Berkeley University in California to invent the elixir of life. In fact, I went to the United States after high school without any help from my parents, and in the innocence of those years, I believed I could attend an art college where I could paint and dance, my other passion, regardless of the fact that it would take a lot of money, which I did not have. At the time, I was looking for a way to express myself, but it was very difficult. In the end, out of exclusion and so as not to remain there without studying, I decided to return to Rome and, having reached a fair compromise with my parents, I enrolled in the Faculty of Languages at La Sapienza in Rome.
Certainly one of my characteristics is continuous research. It is difficult for me to create the same works for too long even though there is an obvious thread that ties them all together. It is as if my ‘DAIMON’ is always suggesting something new that I cannot help but perform.
Among the themes I investigated were war and indifference to the pain of others, the awareness of reality reworked in another dimension, beauty, which can reconstruct reality and free us from so many inner and outer horrors, the search for the divine in the everyday, the struggle between illumination and darkness.
My gaze is constantly changing.
The relationship between human being and nature is the inspiration for the 2023 works in which abstraction and figuration implement a fruitful dualism from which a new dimension emerges.”
PRIZES AND AWARDS
As part of the SyArt Sorrento International Festival, she was awarded the Arbiter Fata Verde 2021 Prize for her interesting and valuable artistic research and was given the front cover with an interview in the April 2022 issue of Arbiter magazine. She also received the Honourable Mention from the Circle Foundation for the Arts 2020 and 2022; she was a finalist in the Lupa Award 2020 and the Celeste Award 2007 and, in 2015, she was the winner of the Pier Maria Rossi Museum competition. Her works can be found in the Copelouzos Family Art Museum in Athens, the SanPaolo Invest Art Collection in Rome and other international private collections. She is featured in the 2020 edition of the De Agostini Atlas of Contemporary Art, the most comprehensive survey of Italian artists from 1950 to the present. In 2006 she was invited to exhibit as honour guest at the International Photo Festival in Lodz (Poland) and in 2010 at the Italian Cultural Institute in Damascus (Syria) with the solo exhibition Urban Visions in Progress, at the International Symposium in Idlib (Syria) organized by the Syrian Ministry of Culture. In 2023 also at the Cairo Amman Bank international symposium in Jordan organized by CAB art Gallery.