Giuseppe Gallo - Gallery No.5 - Artmontecarlo 2017

Giuseppe Gallo represented Fondazione VOLUME! at the second edition of Artmontecarlo, a new art fair on the Côte d’Azur, where the foundation exposed in the non profit and Institutions section. On this occasion, the Foundation chose to present a new work by Giuseppe Gallo, one of the artists of the Nuova Scuola Romana.

Gallery No.5, specially designed for the Monegasque "Salon", is the fifth version of a project that began in 2012, inspired by the henhouse, and hides several ironic interpretations, linked to puns and to elements from the natural sphere, always recurring in the work of the artist.

These houses for cocks and hens, conceived originally for his house in the countryside, started out as a personal space, where to feel at ease, and to be reunited with the memories of his childhood. In a wider prospective the henhouses become a sort of a family space including ironically, the art system. The “gallerie”

( meaning also henhouses in the Italian language) do not lose their original purpose, but they play with the concept of becoming the place where the ideas (eggs) are born.

Each “Galleria” is a unique artwork, designed in total respect of the environment, made of ecological materials. The stairs are derived from hand-carved oak branches and also the coulour is ecological.

While walking through the art fair, the viewer finds himself in front of an object that surprises and intrigues, because of its decontextualization and the consequent relocation in an unusual setting like an artfair.

Gallo’s artwork puts the spectator in front of many questions about his nature and the motivation of its presence there, questions that are well stated and expressed by the words of the philosopher Stefano Velotti, which accompany the exhibition: “The heart of the henhouse is perhaps elsewhere, maybe brooding inside the eggs, and in their fecundation. [...] And after all every work of art is like an egg in between life and death, between what matures, discloses, reveals - that erupts from a shell - and what has always already passed, memories of what no longer exists. An empty shell .”