DOWNTOWN—British artist Louise Giovanelli’s paintings made in collaboration with the downtown cinema Metrograph at Grimm Gallery, begin where a film image has already been cut loose from its source. Faces, gestures, light, makeup, and atmosphere, the paintings are in dialogue with a curation of films playing at Metrograph throughout the month. Selections included Gummo, Kids, Ticket of No Return, and Buffalo ‘66. The partnership between gallery and cinema creates a novelistic link between Giovanelli’s works, and their cinematic source material.

Technically precious and visually pungent, Giovanelli’s paintings jump at you with tight, cropped, glowing vignettes that float, detached, from their unknown, larger narrative. In this series, she draws on specific film stills, isolating fragments of faces, gestures, and light. Clippings, punctums, visual grammars.

The show reveals clear leanings toward 1990s independent cinema: bleached brows, metallic eyeshadow, diffuse lighting, and images that feel suspended between glamour and unease. The result is tactile and striking, making the film still feel less like evidence of a scene than an object in its own right.

Grimm 54, located on White Street in Tribeca, is well-scaled to Giovanelli’s canvases, allowing each work room to breathe. The Metrograph collaboration gives the exhibition its larger frame: a reminder that cinema can survive outside the screen, and that painting can return a still image to a different kind of movement.

Still Moving remains on view through 21 June, 2026.