Ludovica Gioscia is an artist who has been primarily based in London for decades, with periods of undertaking projects in the USA and her native Italy. Hers is an eclectic practice that takes in sculpture, 2-D work, resistant media, and collage—among other media—often brought together in installations or becoming a meta-work where the end of one piece and the beginning of another is not obvious in the gestalt played out in a gallery space.
Like a number of artists of her generation, she found London a simpatico place to evolve her practice after completing both her initial and post-grad art education in the city. But, despite studying in the UK and having been an active participant in London’s artistic communities since the early Noughties, there remains something beautifully and quintessentially Italian about her work.
There is something deeply archaeological in how Ludovica positions her work, sifting through the layers of artistic movements that preceded her or emerged shoulder-to-shoulder with her generation. This is particularly relevant to her IN HOUSE project.
Ludovica Gioscia’s project for IN HOUSE builds on an existing body of work that she has evolved for some time—for example, the works shown in Los Angeles in 2017—in which she uses “readymade” forms of commercial cosmetic product packaging and bottling to create moulds in order to create a “positive” rendition of the original. In the earlier work, the artistic choices are limited in a self-disciplined way: what preexisting products to select; what to retain or remove in the final object produced from the cast; what relationships to create between cast objects; and what colour (if any) to apply. The resulting works have undeniably archaeological overtones; things that appear as delicate and treasured as if they were in the British Museum of the revered museums of her hometown of Rome, freed from ancient soil with patience using only a brush and then, for a second time, preserved for posterity.
