Sculptural Entities

This A Corner With Editions with Giovanna Petrocchi is the first in the series investigating one body of work at a time, including commissioning texts by Christopher Littlewood and Sunil Shah.

“Giovanna Petrocchi’s sculptural collages appear familiar to us. They evoke a geological, palaeontological archive of fossils and invite a comparison with the mysterious figures aligned to their right. Are we looking at a cross-section of the fossil or some representation or abstraction of it?” Sunil Shah

Giovanna Petrocchi is an Italian photographer based in London. She graduated from the London College of Communication with a BA in Photography in 2015 and she recently completed her MA in Visual Arts at Camberwell College of Arts, London. In 2017 she was selected as a winner of the Lens Culture Emerging Talent Award and in 2019 she exhibited her latest body of work at The Photographers’ Gallery as part of TPG New Talent mentoring program. She has been recently nominated by CAMERA - Centro Italiano per la Fotografia to be part of the 2020 FUTURES photography talents. Recent exhibitions include ‘With Monochrome Eyes’ at the Borough Road Gallery, London, and the Athens Photo Festival at the Benaki Museum, Athens.

By combining personal photographs with found imagery and hand-made collages with 3d printing processes, Giovanna creates imaginary landscapes inspired by surrealist paintings virtual realities, and ancient cultures. Influenced by museum displays and catalogues, Giovanna populates these landscapes with her own collection of surreal artefacts. The received view of ancient objects is deliberately distorted. A recurrent feature of her work is the juxtaposition of futuristic and primordial scenarios and the combination of historical and fictional elements.