Peter Gallo at The Douglas Hyde Gallery to be Presented Oct. 9-Dec. 3

The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin presents Peter Gallo, 9 October - 3 December. The first solo museum exhibition in Europe of work by Peter Gallo.

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 materials serve as sources for his paintings, as surfaces on which to draw, paint, or write, or as facture for his collages and assemblages.

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. 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.

These are works that appeal direct to the emotions but uncomfortably stir the mind. Gallo has the ability to wire up extraordinary material sensitivity with a telling philosophical perception. Disarming musings of mind and matter that linger like incendiary embers.

The exhibition at Douglas Hyde Gallery will be accompanied by an illustrated publication with an essay by Roger Cook.