A complete body of Omar Galliani's graphic works exhibited for the first time in Città di Castello

From Dec. 7, 2024 to Feb. 7, 2025, the Città di Castello (Perugia) Gallery of the Arts will host Di Segno in Segno, a solo exhibition by Omar Galliani, with a critical text by Lorenzo Fiorucci, produced under the patronage of the City of Città di Castello, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio Città di Castello, Rotary Club Città di Castello and the technical partnership of Petruzzi Editore.

On this occasion, a complete body of graphic works by Italian drawing master Omar Galliani, executed from the 1970s to the 2000s, is on display for the first time. The exhibition includes some 15 works, many of them in large formats, unusual for engravings. Also on display are some unique examples, which associate lithography on stone with manual interventions in tempera or pastel or applications in Carrara marble.

“If Galliani’s best-known works find in drawing the most authentic matrix of his production, as well as his favorite technique,” writes Lorenzo Fiorucci, “in lithography he does not lose the genuineness of his research, albeit with sometimes surprisingly different outcomes. In the lithographs one can in fact appreciate what are the technical qualities of a graphic sign that in its unraveling among the smooth surface of the stone becomes first an inverted mirror of an image and then a metaphor of a study pursued, without solution of continuity, from the 1970s to the present, in a perspective increasingly oriented to a reinterpretation of the very idea of figure, also through historical samplings and quotations, as well as poetic archaic myths. [...] In the aquatint, on the other hand, that tonal, chromatic datum of sophisticated oneiric construction emerges preponderantly, almost in an evocative mixture of symbolist instances immersed in surreal cosmic suggestions. The fascination of Galliani’s research lies precisely in this ability to stitch together visions, creating a spell, which transports the observer inside a variegated world, made up of blends of East and West, atmospheric evanescence, metaphysical echoes, classical quotations and contemporary references.”

“Every time you scratch a slab you notice the background of light advancing or receding, and the reflection snags and sounds with a few deaf and linear notes. Line of shadow or light where acids devour and blunt your night marks. Night of soluble or ethereal nitrates in long or short poses. Night of pale marks inked in black or red. Night of hands light or heavy in removing or adding. Oily mestica of grooves kissed by wet, heavy papers. Deposit of salts, light evaporating of water and ink. In the fixed or mobile the unique and the multiple surface in the dynasty of signs interrupted by the Arabic numeral. Code of violated passions on a tender copper plate,” wrote Omar Galliani in 1991, during a trip to Prague.

For info: www.galleriadellearti.net

Hours: Daily 10:30 am to 1 pm and 5 pm to 7:30 pm. Free admission.

A complete body of Omar Galliani's graphic works exhibited for the first time in Città di Castello

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