Louise Giovanelli’s “In the Light of False Suns” at White Cube London: Curtains, Kisses and a Carcass

Parhelia — the “false suns” that flare on either side of the real one when sunlight passes through ice crystals — are borrowed light: bright, persuasive and wholly dependent on a source somewhere else. Louise Giovanelli has made them the governing metaphor of “In the Light of False Suns”, her exhibition of new paintings at White Cube Mason’s Yard in London, on view from 20 November 2026 to 16 January 2027. It is an apt image for a painter whose subjects — stage curtains, glossy hair, screen idols — have always been about glamour that glows without quite being real.

Who is Louise Giovanelli?

Born in London in 1993, Giovanelli lives and works in Manchester. She took her BA at Manchester School of Art in 2015 and then studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt between 2018 and 2020 under the painter Amy Sillman. In barely a decade she has built an unusually strong institutional record: White Cube lists solo exhibitions at The Hepworth Wakefield (2024–25), HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark in Graz (2025), Museum Villa Stuck in Munich (2025–26), He Art Museum in Foshan, China (2024) and Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool (2026), along with group shows at the Hayward Gallery and the FLAG Art Foundation in New York.

The timing of the London show is notable. Giovanelli is also included in British Art Show 10 at the Mead Gallery, Coventry, and in the NGV Triennial 2026 in Melbourne, which opens on 13 December. Few painters of her generation will be this visible across three continents at once.

A vocabulary of curtains, hair and screen idols

Giovanelli works with a deliberately narrow set of motifs and returns to them again and again: theatrical curtains, swathes of hair, the faces of female film stars and the cinematic kiss. Her oils are richly worked and luminous, sitting somewhere between figuration and abstraction — a fold of velvet can read as pure colour field until the eye catches the hem. The curtain is the key. It is a threshold that both promises and withholds, the moment before a performance or a revelation. Hair functions in a similar way, as ornament and veil at once.

The gallery frames the new body of work through the artificial radiance of cinema, theatre and religious imagery, and through the way light moves across a painted surface. “False suns”, in this reading, are the spotlights and screen glows that make an image desirable.

Light as desire

The exhibition text borrows a term from psychoanalysis: cathexis, the investment of psychic energy in a person, object or idea. Giovanelli uses secondary, reflected light to charge images of drapery, hair and the body with that kind of investment. Three new paintings show female faces with closed eyes and parted lips, superimposed on brightly lit curtains. According to White Cube, these canvases bring together motifs the artist had previously kept in separate works; in her own words, quoted by the gallery, “the curtain and the female figure charge one another.” Expect these to be the emotional centre of the show.

A new subject: the carcass

The surprise is a large painting of a meat carcass, a subject new to her work. Cropped in close, the marbling of flesh and fat begins to look like a seascape, a geological section or a night sky, so that the scale slides between the body and the cosmos. The motif has a heavy art-historical lineage — Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox of 1655 in the Louvre, the carcasses of Chaïm Soutine, Francis Bacon’s butchers’ shops — and it will be fascinating to see how a painter so associated with sheen and seduction handles meat. The exhibition’s lead image, Ad Astra (2026), takes its title from the Latin for “to the stars”, a hint at how far the show wants its imagery to travel.

White Cube Mason’s Yard in context

White Cube’s Mason’s Yard space sits in a quiet courtyard in St James’s, a few minutes’ walk from Piccadilly and in one of London’s oldest art-dealing districts. Its intimate scale suits a focused presentation of new canvases, and a late-November opening places the show squarely in the busy winter season that follows Frieze week.

Why it matters for painters and collectors

• For painters: a lesson in how a small, obsessive repertoire of motifs can generate depth rather than repetition — and in how surface finish carries meaning.
• For collectors: an artist represented by White Cube with significant museum momentum, presenting new paintings and a new subject in the same show — the start of a fresh chapter rather than a recap.
• For London audiences: one of the season’s most anticipated painting exhibitions, free to visit in central London.

Visiting information

White Cube Mason’s Yard, 25–26 Mason’s Yard, London SW1Y 6BU. 20 November 2026 – 16 January 2027. The gallery has not published a private-view time or exhibition-specific hours on the exhibition page, so please check opening times with White Cube before visiting. Full details are on our In the Light of False Suns listing and on the official White Cube exhibition page. For more openings in London, Paris, Istanbul and beyond, see Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.