"Forest & Mountains" Art Exhibition - January 2024

Roberta Giuliani is a geologist, who has been frequenting the central Apennines, Italy, for more than 20 years, studying the Quaternary geology, the surface and geomorphological effects of recent tectonics in the area. Her research activity allowed Roberta to have a deep relationship with each landscape she painted, as these landscapes belong fundamentally to her memory. On July, 12th 2023 she made a personal exhibition in Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, as part of an international scientific congress on Quaternary Geology, the INQUA congress. The numerous canvases depict the Gran Sasso massif under different lights, corresponding to different times, enhancing its volumes and making it almost an abstract subject. The light, depicted at different times of the day, makes the subject changeable. The Gran Sasso massif is thus repeated in the many canvases with the same view, and the viewer is a participant in this representation that becomes a tale of time flowing on these reliefs determining different light conditions. Thus, her professional experience and her love for nature often appear within her artwork, in the form of the subjects of her works: landscapes, woods, sketches of geological landscapes, or rock outcroppings. “Nature” was the theme of her first personal exhibition, held at Palazzo Odescalchi in Rome in 2012, which included also large-format canvases, inspired by woods and also by the fauna that inhabit them. In 2015, on the occasion of the first centennial of the dramatic earthquake in Avezzano, Roberta conceived and curated three exhibitions of contemporary art focused on earthquakes and entitled “Dislocations,” which included also five of her own works: one was held at Sapienza University’s Geology Museum and opened on the “Night of Museums”; another was held at the Palazzo Palladini in Pescina (in the province of L’Aquila); and the third was held at the Orsini Colonna Castle in Avezzano (also in the province of L’Aquila) as part of the commemorations for the centennial of that earthquake. In 2019, she took part in an exhibition held at the Museo di San Francesco in Montefalco (in the province of Perugia) entitled “The Place and Memory.” Her painting often becomes a retelling of the places she has lived in and studied in her geological survey work. The vertical development of rocky paths or walls becomes the protagonist of her painterly imagination.