ITALIAN ARTIST Elena Dova is currently exhibiting her striking new paintings at the Town Hall Theatre bar in a show, Crosbhóthar, that imaginatively blends the three cities in her life; Turin, Rome, and Galway.
Born and raised in Turin, Elena then moved to Rome where she worked as a sound designer at the post-production film studio Technicolor. Three years ago she upped sticks and settled in Galway.
“I would like to show a strong feeling of belonging to all of them” she says “The exhibition invites you to make a trip to my idea of a perfect city. I've integrated into Galway my elements of a past time that still remains in the present. In every painting there is a hidden message, a symbol, a call to the three cities, that I invite to find. Irony is the leading thread, in a ‘crossroad’ of two cultures in a unique, surreal, poetic and mournful representation.”
She notes how the paintings in this show are "very different" to her last exhibition. “They are all oil on canvas," she notes, "and they combine aspects of the three cities in each image. For example there is one painting where I have a Galway hooker sailing into Saint Peter’s Square, and in another I have located the Coliseum at the end of Druid Lane.”
The paintings fuse Elena’s Italian and Galwegian elements with great wit and panache. In one image of cheese being grated onto a plate of spaghetti closer inspection shows the cheese to be a replica of Galway cathedral.
Of the 10 paintings in the show, five have already sold and these are works that would grace and enhance any wall. Check them out. The show runs until the beginning of December.
.
