Saturday 18 May 2019 at 18.30, Galleria Mazzoli presents the solo exhibition byGiuseppe Gallo La caverna di Kant (Kant’s Cave). The show includes a selection of works made by the artist from 2001 to 2019 and a series of pieces on panels produced for the occasion. Giuseppe Gallo, one of the leading Italian contemporary artists, was born in Rogliano (CS) in 1954. Since 1976 he has lived in Rome, where in the early 1980s he set up his studio in the former Cerere pasta factory, in the San Lorenzo district.
Gallo’s works contain a dense weave of signs, symbols and forms from real and fantasy worlds. Human profiles are combined with stylized forms of animals in a festive outburst of signs that invade the canvas with bright colors. Language also has its place in his creations, with letters inserted in the graphic pattern of the shapes like symbols, vehicles of a mysterious meaning, while numbers – symbols of human knowledge – are juxtaposed with the stylized forms of leaves in a chaotic, imaginative classification of the natural world. In his works Gallo nimbly includes references to philosophy, literature, cosmogony, mathematics, sciences and music, in perfect tune with a complex universe of images and symbols. As Achille Bonito Oliva writes in the catalogue, “There is no background in Gallo’s paintings; a sort of impermeable wall restrains the duels of signs that explode on the surface, drawn with colors that remind us of abstract heights of outer space, dizzying depths of the sea. The painting becomes the theater of enactment of an archaic struggle between forces destined to never be stilled, between energies that be evoked but never blocked. This is why the artist uses a language between the organic and the figural, between the informal and suspected representation.”
Giuseppe Gallo has created exhibitions for important Italian and international museums. In 1985 he was invited to participate in the XIIIe Biennale de Paris. He has shown work at the Venice Biennale in 1986, and in 1990 he had his own room in the Italian Pavilion. In 2007 he held a solo exhibition at MACRO, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, curated by Danilo Eccher, tracing back through 25 years of his career. The next year a
major exhibition of his work was curated by Inge Herold and Danilo Eccher at Kunsthalle Mannheim. In 2009 and 2010 he took part in many group shows in important public spaces and museums in Italy: “Italia Contemporanea. Officina San Lorenzo” at MART – the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto; “Gli anni 80. Una prospettiva italiana,” at Villa Reale in Monza; “Keep your seat: stai al tuo posto” at GAM – Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Turin. Centro Italiano Arte Contemporanea of Foligno held a solo show of his work in 2010, “La leggerezza dell’incoscienza.” In 2015, for the 10th anniversary of Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, he presented the exhibition “Il Quinto Quarto.”
Works by Giuseppe Gallo are included in prestigious public collections including those of MoMA New York, Museum Modern Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna, Contemporain Midi Pirenées of Toulouse, Groninger Museum, Fukuyama Museum of Art, Museum Biedermann of Donaueschingen, MART Rovereto and GAM Turin.
Catalogue available, with critical essay by Achille Bonito Oliva
