We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Fabiola Gironi. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Fabiola below.

Alright, Fabiola thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

I grew up in the suburbs of Milano, constantly drawing, inventing stories, and getting lost in my imagination. My mum describes me as a volcano of ideas as a child.
My parents worked a lot, my mother in logistics, my father as a devoted Shotokan karate teacher. From them, I learned discipline, perseverance, and my love for the visual arts. When they had vacations we visited museums and churches to appreciate architecture, sculptures and paintings that are everywhere in Italy.
I was an only child and spent much of my time with my grandmother, who lived with severe mental illness. She had numerous cats, and I remember staring at her while she had full-blown conversations with people who weren’t there. I was both scared and curious about this phenomenon, and it left me with an early sensitivity to the complexity of the human mind.
I begged my parents to let me attend art school, and those years were transformative. Instead of pursuing an MFA, I studied Art History, drawn more to art’s evolution and its relationship with material culture than to the conceptual focus of contemporary programs. My curiosity took me across continents, and eventually to San Francisco, where I worked in galleries by day and taught myself painting at night.
I can’t answer what I could have done to speed up my learning process, life experience and time were essential. I mean, how do you speed up the process of becoming an artist? You can’t, because it’s a process that never ends. Every day, you choose to be creative, and you must have the freedom to choose it again and again; otherwise, it’s all pointless.
The essential skill for me has been sustained attention: to really look, to be patient with the process and to push through with each painting. I painted from life for years, I had to, in order to develop. Today, I am beginning to work from imagination.
Obstacles in the way of learning more? Time, especially as a parent. But painting teaches me to embrace slowness and to look inside. My work deepened once I became a mother and started paying attention to domestic spaces, the objects we live with, the quiet ways they hold memory and how they can be a starting point for imagination. That’s when my voice really began to take shape.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a painter, and I create highly chromatic works that blend the textures of acrylic, oil, and embroidery.
My compositions are rooted in traditional Western techniques, especially Italian oil painting, and they draw from the theatrical style of the Renaissance. But rather than celebrate the grandeur and power typically associated with these classical forms, I use them to subvert those narratives through a personal lens.
My work is autobiographical, beginning with my own lived experience. Instead of kings and gods, I paint laundry, housework, food, and vessels, objects that are often overlooked.
My current body of work, on view at Billis Williams Gallery in LA, explores the threshold between interior and exterior spaces. In these paintings, Mediterranean decorative artifacts such as invented embroidered fabrics, patterned maiolica ceramics, floral arrangements, and terracotta female heads create a space where daily life and imagination coexist. The paintings are all nocturnes, with a starry sky quietly in conversation with the objects below.
These night spaces suggest a deep kinship between the body and the cosmos, as if each vessel holds the memory of stardust.
While I focus on subjects long associated with the feminine and historically pushed to the margins of high art, I aim to reclaim the decorative not as ornamental, but as an essential space for boundless creativity.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

For years in Europe, I walked through churches and museums filled with extraordinary art, work that shaped my imagination and made me want to be an artist.
But it was all made by men.
That absence was hard to accept. I had never met a woman artist I could look up to. Growing up in the 90’s in Italy, a society still machista, was not easy to accept.
Eventually, I traveled to London to visit Frieze and saw a huge painting by Jenny Saville and I was stunt.
It took time, and my own practice, to unlearn that belief. I found myself reaching for materials traditionally tied to male-dominated high art, but I also wanted to reclaim the overlooked: crafts that were often associated with femininity, such as embroidery.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Leaving Italy and traveling the world was a way for me to gain independence, but home, away from home, is never fully whole. We live in a time when many people travel and live abroad seeking more opportunities, but everything is moving so fast. After living in the U.S. for 10 years, you start to question your cultural identity and what you left behind, especially the family you miss most. I’m still lucky to have both my parents and my grandmother alive and well today.
I often ask myself: what does it mean to be Italian, and how do people perceive me and my culture? And I wonder: how will my daughter grow up, and will she still understand Italian traditions the way I do? Things change quickly from first-generation to second-generation immigrants. It’s a delicate balance between wanting to pass down cultural heritage while also allowing the next generation to build their own identity in a different context.
One way I overcome the feeling of displacement is by connecting the colors of California with the composition of Italian painting tradition. The sun light in Los Angeles is so colorful and full of energy, my colors are inspired by this endless summer. This blending of influences allows me to create a bridge between the places I and my family call home and at the same time make my life experience and my art unique.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://fabiolagironi.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gironifabiola/