Omar Galliani

In Omar Galliani's chiaroscuro pencil, pastel and ink portraits of young women and a few young men, his subjects' faces are often overlaid with colorful tattoos that look like lightweight lace veils. Each piece shows the intricate connections between emotion, eroticism, graphic expression and meditation: they have a beatific, saintly glow. Beyond the flesh, Galliani seems to find the impulses of the mind itself, and many would say that that extraordinarily introspective quality of his work is even more exceptional than his technical mastery, which so ably highlights the movement in his subjects' faces and figures. Galliani was born in 1954 in Montecchio Emilia, Italy, where he continues to live and work; he has participated in three Venice Biennales, including a solo exhibition in 1984. Between 2004 and 2006 his work appeared in museums in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Sao Paolo, Mexico City, Miami and Los Angeles.

Omar Galliani is a leading exponent of the "Anachronists" group (espousing Italian humanist culture and reformulating and contaminating iconographies and classical subjects), supported by Maurizio Calvesi, and of critic Flavio Caroli's Primary Magic movement. In Galliani: Turning Point he outlines his own beliefs about art and what lies beyond it.