The Louise Giovanelli Awards

Last year, Louise Giovanelli started a painting school in Manchester called The Apollo Painting School. It was a three-month summer intensive, with visiting lecturers like Doron Langberg and Flora Yukhnovich. Their first cohort consisted of five artists: Isaac Jordan, Hannah-Sophia Guerriero, Deborah Lerner, Isobel Shore, and Ally Fallon. The first summer programme ended in August of 2024.

About a year later, Ally Fallon won the 2025 John Moores Painting Prize, which is the top painting prize in the UK. He was the youngest person to ever win the award. Shortly after, New Contemporaries came out with their 2026 cohort, and of the twenty-six selected artists, three were Apollo graduates: Isobel Shore, Deborah Lerner, and (again) Ally Fallon. For the Apollo students, this was effectively the best-case scenario; there are no higher awards for emerging painters in the UK.

All of this would reflect well on the Apollo Painting School, were it not for the fact that Louise Giovanelli served as juror for both awards. She was one of five judges for the John Moores and one of three for the New Contemporaries. Both competitions receive submissions in the thousands. It's unclear how exactly she managed this clean sweep, but Louise Giovanelli seems to have played both institutions like a fiddle, presumably to improve the optics of the first Apollo cohort.

None of this is widely seen as an inherent conflict of interest or an abuse of public arts infrastructure. Instead, the Apollo Painting School instagram openly posts about all of it, noting that even their staff photographer got into the New Contemporaries. Gone are the days when opportunism was embarrassing and favoritism was obscured; The Apollo School tends to announce their receipts on main.

Believe it or not, it doesn’t actually matter that Louise Giovanelli once studied under Amy Sillman at Stadelschule. She’s a commercial artist--in her early thirties--who makes Balenciaga-adjacent market fodder on an industrial scale. That an artist like this would happily take advantage of the UK’s major institutional arts prizes should come as a surprise to no one. These institutions, however, should know better.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps one of the first lecturers at the Apollo Painting School was a director from the New Contemporaries. Perhaps these institutions are perfectly content working with and for the market. Perhaps the distinction between commercial and non-commercial institutions is obsolete, no longer worth fighting for. Perhaps they really are just market actors.

And so everyone loses. The artists look helpless and undeserving, the institutions look flawed and easy to manipulate, and Louise Giovanelli looks borderline Machiavellian. And for what? To get an art star on the judge’s panel? To make a faux art school look prestigious? It seems that Louise Giovanelli played this game almost exactly the way that it’s meant to be played. And fair enough; so be it. Maybe she should play the game better next time.

- 12/12/25