Gigi Borgese was 15 years old, and already an established TikTok creator, when her manager told her: we’re going to make you famous, and told her that he would fly her out to LA to take her career to the “next level”. She agreed, she’d always loved LA.
And then she was taken to a room with 10 men, all older, all sitting around a circular desk, as they talked about how they wanted her to sing, to promote products, to model. They clearly were only interested in making money off of her; the whole power dynamic was extremely unequal.
It was in that moment that Gigi realized that she was a lamb surrounded by wolves, that she was confronted with the reality of how men see women’s place in the world. She was extremely uncomfortable, and she made sure not to work with that manager again.
Years later, she created “Council”, a painting in a much larger series of deeply personal works. “Council” captures a little of the horror of that day, of unequal power dynamics and exploitation and misogyny. Even today, she is forced to reckon with external perceptions, is forced to consider whether men with whom she interacted in professional settings see her as an artist first, or as a woman who incidentally happens to be an artist.
But that incident was not isolated; starting from when she was 14, and lasting more than three years, Gigi was a public figure on the internet. She built a large following on TikTok, and was very successful. Understandably, as with any young person in that situation, she liked the adulation, liked the attention.
When you’re young and you get validation from the internet, it’s a drug.
But it had its dark side (unwanted attention and harassment), and she had a second harrowing experience when she had to pick up the pieces of her sense of self.
Every girl has this terrible realization when puberty hits, of just what it means to be a woman in a man’s world.
In late 2025, Gigi found that AI-generated porn featuring her likeness was being shared on a discord server with 109 members. A criminal, unforgivable act that went against every rule of morality and privacy and decency; a violation of her rights and person. This deeply traumatic experience led her to re-evaluate many aspects of her successful career as a content creator on TikTok, and has informed much of her art since, including the Apple paintings that have resonated with hundreds of thousands of people worldwide within just two months of their creation.
Apple Series 2025
The last third of 2025 saw Gigi create a series of paintings featuring powerful visuals of apples and stabbing worms. They’re deceptively simple, use their elements in interesting permutations, and are deeply allegorical.
The themes that the Apple paintings talk about – patriarchy, misogyny, violence against women, and sexual violence – have swirled around the inside of Gigi’s mind for many years. Her own lived experience with unsolicited advances from men and the imbalance of power between the sexes has informed the series, has made it authentic and powerful, so that you are moved by the paintings on a fundamental level even if you don’t know the backstory.
And the themes, the symbolism, all began to coalesce when “Sharp” was created, and the theme of the series – that the paintings were imbued with even before there was a theme in Gigi’s own mind – became entirely clear to her.
Several forbidden fruit interpretations have posited that Eve eating the apple in the Garden of Eden is not a literal description, but rather a metaphor for her having sex with Satan. Therefore, her Original Sin wasn’t that of disobeying God’s word and eating the apple; rather, it was having sex. And this original sin has been held against women over the centuries and millennia, has been used to subjugate them, to hold their bodies and minds in thrall, by men.
After Gigi painted “Sharp”, she came to realize that the apple in the series of paintings was a sexual symbol, and that the stabbing worms were representations of penises and of the role of men in society. A worm is a fundamentally foreign entity in an apple; its presence is unnatural, especially when uninvited.
In “Sharp”, there is a particularly unsettling depiction of the worm violently stabbing through the apples, its act of violation playing out both in the world of the painting and in the world of shadows behind the apples, distorted and grotesque. The allegory is complete: the worm is the penis, the apple the woman. And the penetration by a sharp, stabbing object – penetration of multiple apples – hints at both sexual violence when the contact is unsolicited, and at the trend of misogynistic men to count their conquests, to reduce women to objects to be subjugated.
Most of the other paintings in the Apple series are inspired by specific events or themes within the overarching theme. There is also another layer of allegory: the apple as the womb. In this interpretation, the worm both emerges from and stabs the apple. All of us come from the womb; most of us spend our formative years receiving nourishment and instruction and care and love from a matriarchal figure.
And at some point, many young men become “red-pilled”; they come under the influence of misogynistic patriarchal ideology, and they come to hate all women, often perpetrating violence of one kind or the other on them. They stab the very womb they came from, that gave them unconditional love and shelter. A reading (because it’s not just a viewing after you are sensitized to the underlying themes) of Gigi’s Apple Paintings with her thoughts as context helps understand their full significance, and then you realize that they are like non-sequential chapters in a novel, one that all women can identify with, one that all women can project their own experiences on.
Gigi has had first hand experience with the attempts by various men to assert dominance over her identity as a woman, to control her body, during her navigation of internet fame at a relatively young age, and even more recently, as she navigates the art world as an artist who happens to be a woman.
Multiple gallery owners and art dealers, powerful men in the art scene in New York, have feigned interest in Gigi’s work, talking about how great it would be to exhibit her art at their galleries.
And when it becomes clear that they only want to go on a date with me, and I turn them down, the door closes. The exhibition opportunity is no longer on the table.
The hypocrisy is all the more galling because many of these men are self-proclaimed feminists. They are unwilling and/or unable to perceive her art, her work, as having intrinsic value.
The Apple Series: Development
Gigi didn’t plan her Apple series of paintings; during a free-form painting session where she put gouache on canvas, she played around with various representations of apples till she found one she loved, and reflected that their significance had always been meaningful to her. The first piece was sketched and painted within five hours, and was shown to the world in late August, two days after she completed it.
It was very well received and, more importantly, Gigi was very happy with how it had come out, and how she had transferred her personal experiences and thoughts to the canvas. The first few were very spontaneous; she had fun with the composition, slowly figuring out how to place objects in ways that were visually interesting, while still retaining every bit of the deeper significance.
As she progressed through the series, Gigi found that she had more well-defined ideas of specific subjects within the broad theme that she wanted to address. It felt cathartic and also natural, like she was able to express ways in which the male half of the world had interacted with her, spontaneously while painting. Two pieces in particular: “Brothers in Arms” and “Council” took a lot longer.
“Brothers in Arms” shows two worms engaged in swordplay; it muses on the nature of male-male violence and hatred, and does so very effectively while showing the worms still stabbing through the apples/wombs, implying that their unbridled aggression towards other men and unchecked love of competition often ends up expanding to aggression against women. When Gigi had the idea to depict this as a sword fight between the pointy stabby ends of two worms, she let it marinate for a while before getting her sketchbook and going to work on the piece, ending up with something that looks stylish and unique, while still having the dark, disturbing, but entirely valid undertones shared by the rest of the collection.
And “Council”, of course, was inspired partly by Gigi’s experience as the only woman in a meeting, a council of much older men. Men who wanted to tell her what to do with her career and what to wear and how to act, men who wanted to extract every ounce of “value” from her youth and talent.
Looking at it through non-rose tinted lenses reveals how tightly the worms encircle that which is within their council’s ambit, how they lock in, allowing nothing free, like a black hole or a molecule, enforcing compliance through its remorseless bonds. There is no trust within the members of the Council; the worms are particularly sharp in this piece, and they thrust threateningly at their neighbors on either side, ready to betray or attack in order to ascend to an even More Important Council.
The apples in this piece use hue and shade very effectively to look almost funereal, they combine with their shadows to take on the appearances of caskets, possibly alluding to the subjugation of women by a system that seeks to kill their self-expression and worth as human beings. There are also many other questions that the piece asks implicitly: why are boardrooms still male-dominated? Why is it necessary to conduct business meetings that feature gross, purposely-established imbalances of power, particularly those that have gender inequality at their roots?
Even the title of “Council” is layered and metaphorical, as are the titles of all Gigi’s works. The word suggests something grand and official and important, a body of people that discusses matters of state, matters of business, matters that will decide the fate of others. However, the depicting of the Council in the painting recalls the worst traits of the council of men from that day in Gigi’s life, where they acted less like honorable officials and much more like a slavering pack of wolves, snarling and ready for internal strife over how best to snare an innocent lamb.
Painting “Council” helped Gigi come to terms with a disturbing incident from her time as a successful content creator on TikTok, helped her realize how she’d done the right thing on that occasion by listening to her instincts and refusing to be controlled. And painting “Council” has helped her to, at least in part, lay the ghosts of that extremely uncomfortable day to rest.
Rosemary the Cat
Gigi was 9 years old when Rosemary came into her life, and she is her twin, her soulmate. She’s been with her for more than a decade; she was flown out to NYC when Gigi moved, and is definitely one of the cornerstones of her human’s life. She’s also her baby, waking her up at all hours of the night; Gigi often jokes that Rosemary was born from her rib. She loves to draw her in all her aspects and moods, silly and majestic and adorable and grumpy.
This intaglio print (“Burnt Rosemary”) is a tongue-in-cheek rendering of how Rosemary sees herself: as a mythic creature, all power and swiftness and slashing claws. The medieval iconography of a griffin is particularly fitting in this context: the lion and the eagle have historically been associated with royalty and absolute power. The finished piece also has a draconian feel to it. Whether you see griffin or dragon first, you see Rosemary as she is in her own mind: monarch of all she surveys.
And that was how the inspiration for this piece struck: Gigi went on a trip to The Met Cloisters, and realized how the griffins there paralleled Rosemary’s self-perception. She keeps pointing to things in the real world and going: That’s Rosie. In this case, her ability to see her cat in everything ended up as a work of art.
Intaglio was historically used for banknotes, portraits of Very Important People, and religious prints – all applications that were far above the ordinary. The use of intaglio for this soul portrait of Rosemary is fitting; she would no doubt approve the use of a rare and complex technique to etch her (self-perceived) likeness on paper. And Gigi has always found that messing around with a new technique is easier when the subject matter is familiar.
The best way to get comfortable is to draw something you love.
This doodle has a lovely story behind it. When Gigi was growing up, Rosemary was an outdoor cat. Every time Gigi came back home from school or work, Rosie waited in the driveway and literally writhed with happiness on the grass or even concrete when she caught her first glimpse of her human, like a little bug, actively miaowing. Hence the rows of bugs to the right of the cat in the doodle; like in the intaglio piece, they draw a parallel, but one based on external perception.
The end result has something of the quality of a scientific illustration in one of Da Vinci’s notebooks, only with 200% added whimsy and magic; a cat doodle transformed through the power of love.
And the piece has just as much fun as Rosemary does within it, rolling on the ground without a care in the world. It is lighthearted, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it is guaranteed to put a smile on any face.
Mediums and Experimentation
Gigi hopes to be an artist that’s not constrained by the medium. She loves opening new doors to artistic experimentation; she finds that every medium has its purpose, and that the unique combination of an artist and a new medium allows different expression. When she creates a work of art, she puts a lot of thought into what she’s doing, how she interacts with the medium, and then just goes for it. Even her Apple series, which features both gouache and acrylic paintings, wasn’t entirely in her comfort zone; she wasn’t very familiar with gouache before she started, but loved how it looked.
The hardest part of painting is to let art exist in an ugly phase for a while.
When Gigi works with a new medium, the initial results are not always encouraging. When she started playing around with intaglio prints, the first few plates did not look good. But she kept at it; she was satisfied with the end result. And she also knows when to stop, when to acknowledge that she did her best and that it’s probably time to try something else and come back to the experiment later.
When she worked with carbon transfer prints, Gigi still remembers how much she “messed up”, and all the errors she made according to the established way of doing things. But, as the pieces took shape and form, she realized that she loved the outcome, that messiness and human inaccuracies had combined to create something that was even better than her initial vision. She now spends time understanding as much as possible about a new medium before starting work, and doesn’t put too much pressure on herself.
For example, one of her most iconic linoleum prints – depicting a mask with a Pinocchio-esque long nose and a spiked mohawk / headpiece – was born out of a broken drumhead that was repurposed into a canvas. The piece is called “Mask’, and was Gigi’s first big foray into the world of lino printing.
To the viewer, “Mask” represents freedom more than anything else. The freedom to look like Pinocchio, to have a long nose and not be judged based on one’s appearance (or for one’s lack of veracity). To wear a spiked mask, or to style one’s hair into a mohawk, and to not be bound by society’s conventions. To pay tribute to a subculture with distinctive visuals and to not care about the connotations that others might place on it. The freedom to create a work of art that looks iconic and distinctive even though you don’t know what makes it special.
The “Mask” / drumhead connection (“Mask” started life as “Mask on Ludwig” on its initial canvas) is also an example of how Gigi’s art is inspired by, and inspires, music and musicians.
Music and Gigi’s Art
Many of Gigi’s closest friends are musicians, wonderful, creative musicians. Inspired by their paraphernalia, she has (in addition to creating “Mask on Ludwig”) painted custom pickguards that look like rows of teeth, adding extra personality to an instrument that is already powerfully unique and stylized.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this pickguard is that it’s not just something that looks cool. It is a work of art in itself, one that makes the viewer feel visceral stirrings of unnameable thoughts, much like music itself does.
This particular pickguard presents teeth in all their essential human glory and flawed-ness. They don’t all sit at the same height / depth within their gums. They’re not airbrushed into toothpaste commercial levels of perfection. They’re a little too zoomed in for perfect comfort while viewing.
But they’re real; life isn’t designed for perfect comfort, and Gigi’s pickguards are designed to move you. And they do.
That’s also true about Gigi’s art in general. It looks cool, yes, but there’s always something interesting lurking beneath the surface. And on the surface. And within the mind of the artist as she created it.
Pixels
Gigi’s work is primarily in analog mediums, but it has many interesting similarities with the digital realm, the domain of pixels and blocks and zeroes and ones.
From music video title cards to two headed bunny stamps, a lot of Gigi’s typography has a pixelated retro bitmap feel; this is combined with unconventional placement of words in relation to each other to create something that feels fresh and new, like a non-orthogonal crossword, like a little puzzle to solve.
Like this piece, which is a love letter to both typography and geometry. The letters feel like they inhabit a non-Euclidean space where the rules that govern scale and skew and straight lines are new and strange and wonderful. The circles and the lines that transcend them make us think of compasses, and the subtle rectangular guide lines in the background feel like the familiar axes we know, set up so that they can be changed, so that the rules can morph into deliciously innovative formats.
The dimensions of Gigi’s paintings, and the sizes at which they are posted to her Instagram page, are both intriguing. They’re often smaller than one would expect, and you cannot always see the level of detail you would like, but the overall meaning is always clear. There’s an interesting parallel there with fonts and glyphs and graphemes: they’re tiny, but a few small letters strung together in the right order can make hearts soar, can lead to the deepest pits of depression, can shake the world, can save the world.
Gigi has also created her own fonts; they’re playful doodles that are tiny quirky universes ripe for discovery; each black-and-white font element giving the viewer that feeling of infinite possibilities that everyone gets when they discover Wingdings and realize that fonts can be wild and glorious and non-conforming.
The Shadow Dimension
Gigi’s paintings exist in two spaces. There’s the space of the painting itself, where the primary objects – apples and worms or swallows – tell their story.
But there’s also a companion dimension, that of the shadows cast by the primary objects. And this dimension isn’t just a straightforward 1:1 mapping of object to expected shadow. It is not merely an exercise in ray optics, but an artistic rendition of another aspect of the soul of the painting.
Like in this piece; the shadows are very close to being entirely physically accurate. But they also look more menacing; the worms thicker and more threatening, the stalks of the apples dwarfed by their unnatural invaders. The apples are also changed, in this mirror shadow dimension, from red objects full of life to dull negative space vacuums; they give the viewer the feeling of the woman, the womb, after violent penetration and exploitation: washed of color, of feeling, of life. The shadow dimension holds as much of the meaning of each painting as the objects in it, and any examination of Gigi’s works would do well to search for its themes there.
The Artist / Influencer Knife Edge
On paper, a lot of Gigi’s work can be described as quirky: the Silly Guys font, the teeth-inspired pickguard, the Burnt Rosemary intaglio. But it’s not quirkiness for quirkiness’ sake; her work is genuinely an expression of what feels like the best artistic decision for each piece.
As someone who understands marketing, and as someone who spent years as a content creator, Gigi understands that artists must spend time creating content around their art to market themselves, and that this can cut into art creation time. But she is against inauthentic artist portrayals on social media, especially those that attach themselves to popular archetypes like the weird withdrawn quirky artist.
Marketing yourself works, and creating an identity works. People who follow you crave that connection. But then you become the product, not your art. And an identity can be manufactured. A lot of people end up not sure if they’re influencers or artists.
Gigi points to another specific example: that of abstract expressionism, which is trendy enough that there’s a flood of artists creating pieces in this format. It only really works, and is authentic, if the artist has something to say, if they have intense lived experiences that shine through in the final piece. Just throwing paint on a canvas without the struggles that informed the works of the abstract expressionist masters creates an empty shell.
You have to want to say something, and you have to have something to say.
Future Plans
I feel like I am in a very experimental time in my practice, which is exciting. I hope to keep creating and to not leave the wonderful flow that I am in. My only expectation for myself is to continue; What I am continuing on will come to me as long as I keep living!
Links
Gigi Borgese Prints – Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/gigiborgeseprints/.
Gigi Borgese – Website and Portfolio: https://www.gigiborgese.com/.
Gigi Borgese – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/borgese.gigi/.