Reggio Emilia, at Phidias Antiques gallery a focus on Omar Galliani

Phidias Antiques gallery in Reggio Emilia presents, from June 24 to September 30, 2022, an in-depth study dedicated to Omar Galliani and the works of the Mantra series, exhibited in the most important Italian and international contemporary art museums. In the rituality of sign and gold, the prayers of theWest merge with those of theEast, resulting in works in which the spirit of the times and contaminations of the present coexist.

The exhibition includes some 30 works on panel, made mainly in black pencil and gold leaf, which characterize the artist’s production from the late 1990s to the present. There are numerous unpublished works, dated 2022 and published for the first time in the corsiero editore catalog accompanying the exhibition.

Among the historical works, a recent Gallery acquisition will also be presented: The Hesitation of Pan (1983), a museum-sized oil on canvas painting that highlights the artist’s relationship with myth. The work had been exhibited at the XLI Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte - La Biennale di Venezia, as part of the exhibition Arte allo specchio curated by Maurizio Calvesi, to which Galliani had been invited to participate with a solo room.

“Sitting or standing, genuflected or suspended in the void, in front of an infinite drawing,” writes Omar Galliani, “I reveal to you Mantra, truth and lie of a sign, which without end and pose seeks and finds between East and West, between the dawn of gold and the night of the pencil its own dimension.”

“Galliani knows that the face is soul and seduction,” wrote Flavio Caroli in 2007. Seduction, true seduction, comes from the soul. Then you have to put it on canvas. And then that face, that ineffable female face, can also have its eyes closed, because the light that illuminates it, caresses it, kisses it, is light from the soul. Concentration of the large, tumid mouth that will be able to return the kisses to which the light invites it. Nobility of the attic nose that now stretches in the climax of a thought: that thought. Infinite breadth of the eyes that want not to see the world, to be touched by the light, and to focus on a desire, a pleasure, or a memory. Of what material that thought is made, it does not matter [...]. What makes the difference is the sign, or the design. The reason is quickly said: because the bet, for Galliani, is to bite the world in a room: or on a page."

Catalog corsiero publisher available in the Gallery with a text by Flavio Caroli.

Opened in 1976 in Reggio Emilia by Antonio and Claudio Esposito, Phidias Antiques gallery specializes in neoclassical furniture, 18th- and 19th-century European painting and sculpture. From 1988 to 1998 the Reggio Emilia location was joined by a space in Milan, where various thematic exhibitions were held (19th-century Orientalist painting, French candelabra from the Revolutionary period, 19th-century sculpture). In the late 1990s, the decision was made to favor and enlarge the Reggio Emilia location with the opening of a new showroom in an aristocratic palace in the historic center. Phidias participates in several antiques exhibitions such as theInternazionale in Milan, Gotha in Parma and Modenantiquaria. The gallery has been associated with FIMA since 1988. Phidias, in addition to the activity related to antiques, is involved in interior design following the client in the choice of objects and division of space. Several works have been published in major magazines in the field. In a dialogue with antiques, the gallery also offers periodic exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, including the retrospective dedicated to Ottorino Davoli (2017), with major works from private collections, the solo show of Vivaldo Poli (2020) and the exhibition Nel segno di Antonio Ligabue (2019) with selected works by Antonio Ligabue and an excursus through Reggio Emilia painting of the late 19th century.

For all information, you can visit the official website of Phidias Antiques gallery.

Pictured: Omar Galliani, Mantra (2022; diptych, black pencil and tempera on board and gold leaf, 100x200 cm)

Reggio Emilia, at Phidias Antiques gallery a focus on Omar Galliani

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