Sheila Giolitti is an American painter currently residing in Norfolk, Virginia.[1]
Giolitti's paintings are predominantly abstract works which are composed in layers that she simultaneously builds up and strips away.[2] Giolitti is also the owner and director of Mayer Fine Art in Norfolk, VA.[3][4] She is represented by Jankossen Contemporary in Basel, Switzerland and Adah Rose Gallery in the Washington, D.C., area. She has been described as "Norfolk, Virginia’s best-known fine artist."[5]
Giolitti was born in Florida, raised in Italy and she studied art at Middlesex University, London, England (BFA), 1981–83 and at Mid Warwick College, Leamington Spa, England, (1978–79) where she received a Diploma in Ceramics.[6] She is the daughter of Italian artist Alberto Giolitti.[7]
In the summer of 2008 Giolitti mounted an exhibition of student artwork at her gallery[8] in Norfolk, which included a nude drawing by Philadelphia art student Erika Risko titled "Martyrdom." The drawing was a realistic rendering of a nude figure on four sheets of paper. At the time, Risko was a senior at the Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia. The exposure of female breasts in the drawing caused complaints leading to the local building management's demand for the breasts to be covered up.[8][9][10]
Starting in 2008, the gallery was the first Virginia-based art gallery to participate in major art fairs (Affordable Art Fair in New York City[11]), and subsequently in major art fairs in Miami during the Art Basel week of art fairs, which has become the art world's top draw.[12][13][14]
In 2023 Giolitti was awarded a Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.[15]
Giolitti has stated about her work:
My involvement with the physical making of the surface is an integral part of the work, meaning that the surface on which I work is created as I work. Each layer of mark making is sealed with a layer of clear resin, which allows for a cataloguing of time and the change that it brings within each piece. These different elements find themselves bound within determined space. These boundaries serve both to unite and separate. They are definite or subtle, encroaching and ignored, erased only to reappear, self-organizing itself into larger more stable wholes.[16]