Zoe Guglielmi

Zoe Guglielmi received her masters of arts degree in contemporary painting from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 2008.

Zoe is still a young, emerging artist and her works are mostly oils on canvas, contemporary figurative paintings. Zoe Guglielmi's style varies from something that resembles naive paintings, but an element near to photo realism will also find it's place if Zoe's expressionist nature requires it.
Motives are rarely bright and shiny - fantastic, surrealist and often quite morbid themes constitute majority of her paintings.
I'm happy to invite you to visit this online gallery. It contains some thirty photos of Zoe's art, chosen on rather random basis - whatever photo could be found. It's not a "best of" gallery, as a lot of paintings, sold, given away and even lost were never photographed (and a lot of photos that exist are photographically unacceptable).
Her style seems to be unique, not influenced by works of her teachers (officially Hubert Schmalix and later Amelie Von Wulffen, with help of Günter Damisch).
Damisch and Schmalix are among the most important contemporary Austrian painters and were members of the "wild youth" art movement.
Zoe is herself part of group of young painters - their recent exhibition series can be considered "art actions", not action art. I'll try to describe the "Zimmer, Küche, Kabinett" project in English on it's own page.

Renowned curator Adam Budak wrote following about Zoe in the catalogue for the exhibition »waking doubting rolling shining and musing improvisation of a faun (or on precarious life)« in 2006:

.. Zoe Guglielmi’s labyrinthian painterly narratives remind of the essayistic stylistic and hermetic imagination of magic realism, from Borgesian mazes through Marquez’s miraculous universes down to Cortazar’s games with nonlinearity. The surreal language, partly precise and careful in its application to the artist’s current emotional state, partly arbitrary as a test-tool for maturity yet to come, builds an oneiric and carnivalesque structure where fantasy and phantasms cohabit with phantoms and hallucinations of identity in formation. Here too, a neobaroque world dominates, with its fragmentation, broken narrative, overlapping layers, overall polyphony and asynchronic structure. Subconsciousness is exploited as a means to write an automatic story where parallel lines create a multiplicity of chances to cut and paste, to reduce and add, to configure and format in order to become an author of your own Constellation. Such is an improvisation of authenticity, in a state between dreaming and awakening, when instincts are at the operation and reason beyond control. ...
I can only agree and just add that the expected maturity is visible in Zoe's recent works.

MILDLY COMMERCIAL PART:

Zoe Guglielmi produces commissioned portraits as well. Although she is ready to do it from a photo, she'll use her imagination and talent to make a work of art out of it - no photo realistic oil copies of photographs. If you are interested, please contact Zoe directly (CONTACT page). This is not a commercial site and I never tried to sell anything online.
Not all paintings on this site are sold - please contact Zoe with the image title for a quote.