Immigrant Roots Provide Inspiration for Loribelle Spirovski’s First Solo Show
“As a child of immigrants, and an immigrant myself, my fixation on space is a particularly meaningful one. How it can affect and shape its occupants,” says Loribelle Spirovski, the 29-year-old visual artist who was born in Manila to a Filipino mother and a Yugoslav father and lives today in Sydney, Australia. In addition to her identity, her father, a structural engineer with a “huge interest” in design, also contributed to the leitmotiv of her body of work: surrealist portraits backdropped by detailed architectural environments. Two dozen of them compose “Love, Death and the Time I Knew You” at the House of Fine Art gallery in London, Spirovski’s first solo show in the city. Fittingly, the paintings, at 4 feet tall, are room-size, their settings, featuring archways and tilework, informed by an artist residency at Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy. One work, The Solipsist, contains a chair that could be a Michael Thonet, but it was inspired by a beloved bentwood rocking chair in the artist’s childhood home.
