ABOUT
Isabella Vella (b. 2001) is an artist born in Toronto, Canada. She earned her BA in Environmental Science at McGill University in 2023. Vella's practice combines painting and drawing, utilizing various media including ink, foraged pigment, acrylic, and gesso. Her materials' textures and opacities produce a flat-plain image where narratives can emerge simultaneously. As you step into Vella’s paintings, you are immediately greeted with a rich assemblage of bodies, landscapes, and symbolism. Natural terrains merge together, figures dissolve into themselves, and charms hang in the air, waiting to be touched. Each painting is a portal into a world on the verge of transformation, where her female protagonists, authoritative and mystic, anchor the viewer into a singular moment. Her paintings offer narrative in its most obscured sense; the story never reveals itself completely, but rather invites you to answer its questions for yourself. Vella explains painting as a means to insert magic and myth into her lived experience; as she puts it, “to turn memory into personal folklore.” By blending her lived experiences with classic myths and catholic iconography, she positions her life within a broader history of female storytelling. The resulting paintings are self-contained ecosystems; intimate tableaus of women moving through landscapes with spiritual agency and narrative performance. Vella has exhibited in both public and commercial galleries in her native Toronto surroundings, as well as in London, New York, Paris, and Copenhagen. She presently lives and works in London, UK.
@isabellagvella
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