The Manchester painter Louise Giovanelli has been named the recipient of the Robson Orr TenTen Award for 2026, and her new print, Media Luna, was unveiled by the arts minister, Baroness Ruth Mackenzie. Giovanelli is the ninth artist to receive the commission, which is presented by the Government Art Collection and sponsored by the philanthropists Sybil Robson Orr and Matthew Orr.
The title is Spanish for “crescent moon” or “half moon,” and it points to something Giovanelli often returns to: the link between the human and the celestial, the intimate and the universal. The image comes from a series in which she takes wigs as her subject. Hair has held her attention because it behaves like fabric and curtains, both of which are long-running themes in her paintings. For this print she rephotographed a blonde wig that she had already used as source material for recent canvases. This time she added what she calls “little glints and specks, and a feeling of celluloid”. In post-production came layers of distortion, rotation, further rephotographing and a doubling effect.
She describes hair as close kin to drapery, a way of obscuring and revealing, of disguise and concealment, and a material that both reflects and absorbs light. She hopes the print will work as a site of reflection on the real and the artificial, contemporary life and worship.
Born in London and raised in Wales, Giovanelli lives and works in Manchester, where she settled in 2011. She earned a BA in Fine Art from Manchester School of Art in 2015 and an MA in Germany in 2020, and has shown in London, Germany, and the United States since 2015. She is also known as an advocate for the city’s artists, and co-directs Apollo Painting School, a non-profit that offers emerging painters in the UK an alternative route to learning.
The scheme works in a particular way. Each year a British artist makes a limited-edition print. Fifteen editions go on display in government buildings and embassies around the world, and eleven are sold, with the money used to buy work by artists under-represented in the Collection. Over the past seven years, that has meant more than forty acquisitions by over thirty artists, among them Sonia Boyce, Jesse Darling, Djofray Makumbu, Ingrid Pollard, Bindi Vora and Barbara Walker. Earlier TenTen artists are Hurvin Anderson in 2018, Tacita Dean, Yinka Shonibare, Lubaina Himid, Rachel Whiteread, Michael Armitage, Denzil Forrester and, last year, Anya Gallaccio.
Mackenzie said the project makes good art more accessible and supports the next generation of creative talent. Eliza Gluckman, director of the Government Art Collection, placed the print in a world where our relationship with images is tested by AI and social media, calling it an alluring look at the real and the artificial. The Orrs, who note that this is the penultimate commission in the ten-year scheme, which began in 2018, said the work will travel to British embassies and government buildings and start conversations across cultures, what they call the quiet power of art as diplomacy.
There is an educational strand too. The Government Art Collection will publish a learning resource for Key Stage 3 students on its website, helping teachers use the print across the curriculum. It belongs to Picture This: The Robson Orr Visual Literacy Research Initiative, a three-year partnership between the Robson Orr Foundation, the University of Oxford, the Government Art Collection and Art UK, which will measure the effect of visual literacy on young people’s later success and place artworks, Giovanelli’s prints included, in classrooms.