La Gita

The characteristic, but ever-evolving, style of Liselotte Watkins’ work is built on a lifelong exploration, conducted in a world of shapes and colours. This artistic expedition has carried Watkins, with her distinctive figures and colour schemes, all over the world. After studies in Texas, at the Art Institute of Dallas, her career picked up momentum when she moved to New York at the close of the 1990s. There, Watkins soon made an impact with her sophisticated fashion illustrations, created for eminent clients like Prada, Vogue, Elle, and The New Yorker.

After having also lived in Paris and Milan, Watkins eventually relocated to Rome (before settling in Siena, where she ended her lauded career as a fashion illustrator in order to focus exclusively on her own art, dedicating herself mostly to studio painting). During the pandemic lockdown in Italy, Watkins watched as the women in her neighbourhood spent their time in and around their homes. These observations gave rise to questions and musings: what kind of lives do these women lead, what are they doing, what are they thinking of and what do they dream about? These questions and musings, in turn, eventually led to highly acclaimed paintings.

One of these paintings, La Gita, was the centrepiece of the exhibition (of the same name) at CFHILL, Stockholm in 2022. For this, her fourth exhibition at CFHILL, Watkins had created brand-new works, partly, inspired by old masters. A certain change,or progress, was evident in the reduced palette (a process begun back in Rome during the COVID-19 lockdown) she had recently adopted after moving to Siena. The exhibition La Gita demonstrated how Watkins’ artistic exploration had been influenced, not only by the musings generated by the sight of all the solitary women, but also by Tuscany, which proved to be a significant stop on her artistic journey. There, in a different environment, she produced several paintings that could be viewed as individual, but yet interconnected, parts of a larger story about allegorical characters who lend themselves to each viewer’s particular interpretations. The individual canvases thus formed a coherent, sometimes transboundary, narrative, inviting the viewer to venture out on a fanciful and exciting journey under the guidance of the mysterious La Gita.

Ahead of the exhibition Michael Storåkers (born 1972, Executive Chairman and Head of Contemporary, CFHILL, Stockholm) asked Watkins about her recent works (‘Liselotte Watkins in conversation with Michael Storåkers’, 2 September 2022):

If you’ll allow me to get right to my questions, the title of the exhibition is La Gita (trip/excursion), and that’s also the title of one of the works in the show. How did you arrive at that title?

-My own feeling is that I’m making fragmentary excursions to various Italian environments, cultures, and cities. I bring things that I like back, collect them in piles, and then they turn up in my paintings.

It’s a kind of artistic hoarding practice. Who or what is La Gita?

-La Gita is less of a ‘she’, and more of a collection of fates and impressions.

Is it a part of a larger narrative within the exhibition, or are the works best viewed as individual portraits?

-This is a story told about allegorical characters. They all matter to the story individually, but they also represent ideas and the symbols that accompany them as objects.

Although Watkins, during her time in Rome, used to spend a lot of time in environments defined by the geniuses of the Italian baroque, like Bernini (1598 - 1680) and Caravaggio (1571 - 1610), she has stated that while working on La Gita, she looked rather to Spanish painters such as Francisco de Zurbarán (1598 - 1664), specifically his paintings of female saints, and Diego Velázquez (1599 - 1660). The depicted women (which resemble the figures in 16th century Flemish and Northern European painting) are also characterised by a body language without any of the dramatic expressions of the Baroque, which makes them seem more connected to late medieval painting or the ideals of the early Renaissance.

Works like La Gita make it very clear that Watkins’ artistic explorations are still, and always, ongoing. At the same time, these paintings are rife with humorous, playful details, which serve to connect these subjects with Watkins’ past studio productions, while also extending a hand to past generations of artists.

On a final note: the film La Gita (by Italian director Salvatore Alloca), released in 2018 (just a few years before Watkins made her painting), should also be mentioned in this context. Whether the film, which is about a fourteen-year old girl from an immigrant family from Senegal (but born and brought up in Italy) who is faced with the difficult task of finding a place for herself in the world she is living in, has any connection to Watkins’ painting or not remains to be established however.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation