Carola Salvi

BIO

Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychologist and Artist. Dr. Salvi was born in Bergamo (Italy), studied psychology in Milan, and in 2010 moved to Chicago to study at Northwestern University.

In 2019 she joined the Psychiatry Department at the Dell Medical Hospital at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Salvi’s research focuses on the neural bases of creativity, specifically how people generate insightful ideas (i.e., Aha! moments). Dr. Salvi pioneered several breakthroughs in the field of creativity, her scientific work has been quoted on several media outlets such as The Washington Post, BBC, Time.com, The New York Times, and Redbull TV. In the last 12 years, Dr. Salvi’s creative work has focused on film photography.

In 2021 she started working on the theme of violence against women and producing her collection of paintings.

In her paintings Dr Salvi always represents a lady with black hair and long eyelashes on a plain but colorful background so that the subject is only the emotion expressed by the ladies. Pain, anger, sense of mistrust, fear, shock become the only protagonists at stage. The colors in the background never derail the viewer from the subject, which are instead meant to give a “punch” to the emotions expressed by the ladies. The long eyelashes are those of a woman who just cried, “sticky” because wet with tears.

The decision to always paint the same lady comes from the common experience that women victims of domestic violence report. We are all Lady [A] after we are victims of domestic violence, with no difference of age, status, religion or education.

Violence against women starts with sex. The artist purposefully chose to omit any element of sensuality in her ladies, to make the viewer reflect on how violence against women starts from their objectification as a sexual object, and thus someone who is ok to punish. That is why to change the vicious cycle of power and control, we need to begin changing the image of women as sexual object in the way we represent them.

For an explanation of the artworks presented click below or listen to the Genesis Podcast: