Farewell to Massimiliano Galliani, painter and draftsman passes away at just 37 years old

Painter Massimiliano Galliani passed away this morning in Reggio Emilia after a long illness that left him with no chance. He was only 37 years old.

Born in Montecchio Emilia in 1983, Massimiliano was the son of Omar Galliani, one of the most highly regarded living draftsmen. Educated at the Paolo Toschi Art Institute in Parma, he had graduated in New Technologies for Art from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and also obtained a diploma in Film Direction from the Nuova Università del Cinema e della Televisione in Rome. His career had begun under the banner of video art, and as a video maker he had also exhibited in important contexts, such as the Fotografia Europea festival in Reggio Emilia, and had collaborated with Luigi Ontani. Since 2015, he had then devoted himself to painting and drawing: among his exhibitions, it is worth mentioning in particular an exhibition of his works at the Rotonda di San Lorenzo and the Casa del Rigoletto in Mantua in 2017, the solo show Creation at the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia in 2017, and some participations in the Wop Art fair in Lugano, Switzerland. His last exhibition, the solo show Attraverso, had ended last June 10 in the spaces of the prestigious Salamon gallery in Milan.

“In the atmosphere and style of Massimiliano’s works,” the critic Vera Agosti has written about him, “a melancholic imprint leaks out, a tender and lyrical feeling, which nevertheless marries itself to a richness of intent, a constantly evolving research, new and renewed trials to overcome himself, unusual paths that make one think of everything but to a world of memory and mimesis of the already lived and the already seen, which give an exceptional thrust into the future, a very strong projection toward the next moment and the next experimentation.”

“I am deeply touched by the passing of the young Reggio Emilia artist Massimiliano Galliani, whose work in painting and, with increasing frequency and intensity, in pencil drawing qualified him among the greatest promises of contemporary Italian art,” said Uffizi Galleries director Eike Schmidt, his admirer. “Son of art, he had had the courage to explore his own original and personal dimension in the techniques in which his father Omar is a recognized master: the results were excellent, the expectations great.”

“If I had to say goodbye to Massimiliano Galliani by availing myself of an image of him,” said art historian Marzia Faietti, coordinator emerita of the Prints and Drawings Cabinet of the Uffizi, as well as curator of some of her father Omar’s exhibitions, “I would do so with a pencil drawing made in 2019 where a bird takes flight coming out of the black void that a torn paper glimpses almost certainly and a flight, that of the figurine coming towards us, that recalls the existential and artistic leap that every real talent makes along its experience. Inevitably, a thought crosses my mind: a life dedicated to and consoled by art, however short as Massimiliano’s, is worth living.”

Image: Massimiliano Galliani, Self-Portrait and Pencil (2016; pencil on paper, 42 x 60 cm)

Farewell to Massimiliano Galliani, painter and draftsman passes away at just 37 years old

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