Downtown (2010) Painting by Harris Richard

Gemma is an architect who turned artist when she realised that her clients were hanging her designs on their walls as works of art.

She is now best known for her “architectural portraiture” in which she employs sharp lines and strong colours to striking effect. The star of show is the metropolis, imagined and portrayed with stark geometry.

She has been working in Italy since her return in 2010 after six years in London. Her current work is principally dedicated to unearthing and interpreting emblematic examples of the man-made landscape in, amongst other places, London, Milan, Florence and Turin. The two largest pictures in the show are of La Scala Opera House in Milan and Giotto’s Bell Tower in Florence.

Gemma trained as an architect and specialised in the restoration of farmhouses, historic buildings and the construction of new hotels and restaurants. As an architect, she also spent many years in the South of Italy in the reconstruction after the earthquake of 1980, and worked on projects in the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East. In 1992 she studied fresco and marbling techniques in Urbino, which she applied to walls, plaster panels and wooden furnishings. She now works on canvas treated with quartz paint, creating a wall-like surface, on which she lays several coats of acrylic paints with natural pigments.

In 2009 her work was chosen by Italian Cultural Institute for the inaugural art event at the FIAT gallery space in Central London and in 2010 she held her first Italian show at the Rosa Grand Hotel in Milan. In 2011 she opened a gallery in her home town of Manciano in the Maremma area of Tuscany. She is represented in London by the Colomb Art Gallery. Her portrait of the Lingotto Building will appear in the Venice Biennale exhibition in Turin in December 2011.

• Nationality: ITALY
• Date of birth : 1955
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary Italian Artists