Daniele Galliano (1961, Pinerolo, Turin, Italy) works in series with a recurrent theme. He is fascinated by cities, or more specifically, houses and their inhabitants, not only in his native Pinerolo or in Turin and Rome in Italy, but also in New York, Tel Aviv, Kerala or Berlin. Wherever he works or exhibits, he quickly captures the people, houses and streets in sketches, or nowadays with his i-Phone, to later work them out on canvas in the studio.
In the summer of 2015, Galliano worked in Livingstone Projects’ studio in Berlin. The large work on paper, Berlin, and the drawing installations Kreuzberg Constellations and Stars that he made there formed the centrepiece of the exhibition Berlin Constellations at Livingstone gallery in The Hague later that year.
He calls the series featuring houses and streets Larve. We grow up in our houses, populate our cities and scatter to other houses, other cities, other countries, and we leave our traces everywhere. Galliano wants to capture those traces, which make the city unique. In his recent work Morti Viventi, the living dead, he also paints the inhabitants of the past, bringing them back to life like ghosts still haunting their homes.
Galliano sees the patterns that we humans form together in the city as ‘constellations’. He depicts crowds at concerts, demonstrations or mass migrations as abstract dots on the canvas, like galaxies in the universe.
Daniele Galliano lives and works in Turin. With no formal academic training, he began exhibiting internationally in the early 1990s. In 1996, he made his US debut at the renowned Annina Nosei Gallery in New York. His work was part of the museum presentation at the 9th Havana Biennale in 2006 and the Italian pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. In 2016, his work was exhibited at the third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, India.
Galliano’s work is included in some of the world’s most important museum and private collections, including the Galleria Civica d’arte Moderna and Contemporanea in Turin and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. (Text in Italian, English and Dutch).
