White Room: Peter Gallo

White Columns is proud to present a solo exhibition of the Hyde Park, Vermont-based artist Peter Gallo. Gallo’s works oscillate freely between painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture. Chock-full of literary, art historical, cultural, political and musical references (and detours) Gallo’s works, when seen together, combine to create a poetic, albeit labyrinthine, mise-en-scene. The critic James Wood recently identified in Gallo: “an alert scavenger’s attitude towards culture; an eye for the poignant frailties of the vernacular; and an occasionally breath-taking ability to evoke issues of great import. … Gallo treats the world and his mind as jumbled compendiums, filled with little connections and bursts of revelation that his seemingly slight but actually pointed interventions reveal. … A partial inventory of Gallo’s materials would include dental floss, toothpicks, a towel, string, wire, French Vermillion oil paint, buttons, toilet paper, spackle, bric-a-brac, a bed sheet, picture frames, amateur sculptures and patterned fabrics. These are usually mixed with snippets of found text or references to figures of cultural authority … that allude to the likes of Spengler, Nietzsche, Kant, Pasolini, and Mondrian. His output becomes a kind of pantheon of gravitas – or in its use of vernacular text, antigravitas made vital by the intensity of Gallo’s scribbles and his disinterest in pictorial nicety.”

Peter Gallo lives and works in Hyde Park, Vermont. He recently had a solo show at the Wendy Cooper Gallery, Chicago (2004), and was included in a group show at Volume, Inc., New York (2005). Peter is a doctoral candidate in art history at Concordia University in Montreal, where he is also a part-time member of the faculty. He also works as a psychiatric social worker in a rural health care agency in northern Vermont, and is a member of the Grass Roots Art and Community Efforts in Hardwick. His reviews and articles have appeared in Art in America and Art New England.