Isabella Vella
Formation Gallery
06 Jun 2025 – 09 Aug 2025
Formation Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Canadian-born artist Isabella Vella. With Watchers in Ritual, Vella explores the charged relationship between observer and observed—an ambiguous terrain where playfulness, desire, and mystery intertwine.
In the new series of paintings, a central figure—often female—moves beneath a spotlight of attention: shadowy presences that watch without menace yet exude a sensual, almost flirtatious energy. The protagonist may recline languidly, engage passively in oddly unnatural acts, or dissolve into her own silhouette. These intimate tableaux become self-contained ecosystems: tall grass to hide in, insects crawling across skin, enclosed spaces, and tangles of vines and snakes.
Set within a theatrical space, Vella’s paintings stage narrative and performance with meticulous detail and symbolic weight. Her female characters possess agency and complexity, and their bond to their surroundings—landscapes, bodies, materials—is vital. Rather than claustrophobia, the works evoke an embrace of gaze and nature. For Vella, painting is a way to “folklorize” memory, transforming lived experience into personal myth. Medieval imagery and religious iconography recur as visual and narrative touchstones, re-imagined through a contemporary, feminine lens.
Isabella Vella (b. Toronto, 2001) studied Geography and Environmental Science at McGill University—an academic foundation that resonates in her work, where environment and place are key. She has exhibited in both institutional and commercial venues in Toronto, London, and Copenhagen, and her paintings have also featured in New York and at the Albright Knox Museum in Buffalo.
Working at the intersection of painting and drawing, Vella employs ink, natural pigments, acrylic, and gesso. Her images feature flat, tactile surfaces where multiple narrative layers emerge simultaneously. Drawing on her background in environmental science, she crafts female-led stories that bridge past and present, often set in landscapes probing femininity’s rapport with nature. Medieval paintings and manuscripts frequently serve as points of reference, allowing her to weave worlds of intimacy, sensuality, and interconnectedness—linking the Medieval Warm Period to today’s Anthropocene.
