PORTLAND, ORE.- Adams and Ollman opened Peter Gallo: Gods, Sluts & Martyrs, the artist's first solo exhibition on the West Coast of the United States. The exhibition features paintings and mixed media collages on found objects created over the past decade. Gods, Sluts & Martyrs will be on view at the gallery in Portland, Oregon through May 10, 2025.
Gallo's painterly assemblages layer collections of fabric scraps, photocopied imagery, and found materials, including broken chairs, antique cutting boards, rusty baking pans, and old books, into informal compositions—what one critic described as "grunge arte povera." Atop these well-worn materials, each with its own history, Gallo intervenes with a tumult of thick paint, often in shades of red and pink, building up marks sometimes over many years. Like uncanny artifacts from some anterior future, these works contain a multiplicity of time: they feel both new and old, quick and slow, slapdash and carefully, ritually assembled.
Gallo's pursuit is poetic, reflecting back the beauty and poignancy of existing realities. He employs snippets of text—borrowed bits of songs or other artists' writings, common phrases from our everyday environment—squeezed through hypodermic needles in a script that is both barely legible and unmistakably direct. Violets Violets Violets (E. Dickinson), 2016-2025, echoes imagery from Dickinson's famous poem, while Emergency Entrance, 2019-2024, recalls hospital signage—distinct sources that emphasize the fleeting nature of existence. Through these words, Gallo explores language's core—its strangeness, seductiveness, and its complex semiotic relationship to images, revealing its heartbreaking inadequacy and brutality.
Gallo's aesthetic is anarchic; the works are messy, diminutive, and even abject, yet they evoke a sublime vastness. The title Gods, Sluts & Martyrs invites interpretation through frameworks of religious symbolism, power dynamics, sexual excess, and sacrifice. Central to the exhibition is Possession, 2023-2025, featuring stock reproductions of Bernini's ecstatic St. Theresa collaged across found weatherized plywood panels. Fluent in Catholic iconography (holding a PhD in Art History), Gallo uses a symbolic language rooted in the body—its transgressions, flesh, and control. The works on view evidence corporeal fragility and corruption through representations of blood, bandages, wounds, and holes—invoking the body at its limits in states of pleasure and pain.
Peter Gallo (b. 1959, Rutland, VT) lives and works in Hyde Park, VT. He received a BA from Middlebury College and an MA and PhD in Art History from Concordia University, Montreal. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, and White Columns, New York, NY. The artist's work has been highlighted in publications including Artforum, the Village Voice, The New York Times, and Art in America.
