'UTOPIA', A SCULPTURE, 1990

Giuseppe Gallo is a major figure in the New Roman School, also called the San Lorenzo Workshop because the artist moved his studio to the Pastificio Cerere building, an abandoned pasta factory in the San Lorenzo industrial district in Rome in 1977. Gallo began a trend, and other artists soon followed. Cumulatively they would not just revitalize the neighborhood to make it a district for contemporary arts, but also revitalize Italian art. Curator Sergio Risallti credits Gallo with forging a new direction in Italian art after the Arte Povera of the 1960s and Transavanguardia of the 1970s, saying “The painting and sculpture of Giuseppe Gallo has been slowly forged in the…workshop of civilizations and cultures, of continuities and discontinuities [of metaphysical and physical forms]. ...He achieves his pursuit with...mnemonic reworking of images and forms, then abandons this entire heritage to its ancient time in order to rediscover the artist’s own time and a future, critically and radically” (S. Risallti, “Giuseppe Gallo: Gioco felice di un suonatore di tamburi,” Modena, 2007, pp. 20-27).