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biography

(b. 1959, Rutland, VT) lives and works in Hyde Park, VT. He is a doctoral candidate in art history at Concordia University, Montreal, where he is authoring “Medicalisation and its Discontents: The Artist as Case History.” He has a MA from Concordia University, Montreal and a BA from Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT. Additionally, the artist works as a psychiatric social worker in a rural health care agency in Northern Vermont and has been active in the Grass Roots Art and Community Efforts (GRACE) in Hardwick, VT. He has organized numerous exhibitions including Our Yard in the Future: The Art of Gayleen Aiken (Horton Gallery, 2007) and has contributed criticism to Art in America and Art New England, among others.

Since the early 1980’s Gallo has been assembling an archive; an “image repertoire” of materials such as found photographs, drawings, texts, newspaper clippings, passages which he has jotted down from philosophical or poetic texts, exhibition announcements, hand written lists, medical diagrams, photocopies, vintage porno, postcards, album covers, pharmaceutical promotionals, letters from his late mother, political buttons, and even the remains of a meal (the artist seems to have an affinity for chicken bones). The materials serve as sources for his paintings, as surfaces on which to draw, paint, or write, or as facture for his collages and assemblages.

Drawing from this wide range of texts and images, Gallo utilizes simple formal structures and gestures - channelled through an exquisitely lyrical aesthetic sensibility - in an often frank and confrontational fashion. In the tradition of punk, neo-punk, Lettrism and Situationism, Gallo steals the words and images of others for his own ends; snippets from Roland Barthes, Freud, Mondrian, and queer pornography – oftentimes mixed in with lyrics gleaned from Gallo's favourite music: The Cocteau Twins, Dusty Springfield, The Magnetic Fields, or Joy Division (:the artist is a Joy Division diehard). Yet, for all its critical or confrontational energy, Gallo's seemingly apathetic scrawl or brushstroke across a found object or yard sale painting conveys something ultimately profound and positive, including his own abiding love for Modernist painting

exhibitions

• 2016
• peter gallo, anthony reynolds gallery in collaboration with angels barcelona

• 2012
• peter gallo

publications

• 2014
• peter gallo, the douglas hyde gallery, ireland