Alessandro Gallo

"Monkey Business", Contemporary, Mixed Media, Ceramic, Figurative, Sculpture

2018

Alessando Gallo is an Italian contemporary artist, born in Genoa, Italy in 1974. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art, in London, United Kingdom, in 2002. By 2005 he began working sculpture. The first piece he created was a donkey wearing a suit, with his hands in the pockets. Adriano Leverone, an Italian sculptor taught Gallo about sculpting the clay in his studio near Genoa, Italy. The clay sculptures are anthropomorphic, half-animals, half-humans. “Animals carry strong associations that make them ideal in portraying, sometimes humorously, our basic disposition or nature. Some animals have a long cultural history while others display biological features that can be extended metaphorically to humans, which is why they’ve been used to embody intangible values and vices across all ages and cultures in numberless stories and myths. Donkeys are stubborn, eagles are noble, pigs are greedy. Every language has numberless connections between animals and abstract states expressed in popular idioms like ‘monkey business’, ‘elephant’s memory’, ‘culture vulture’, ‘rat race’ and so on. I combine the animal head and the meanings they evoke with the silent language of our body and the cultural codes of fashion in order to portray some individuals, the larger subcultures they belong to and the habitat we share.” - Artist Statement