Omar Galliani's Self-Portrait donated to the Uffizi Galleries will be unveiled Oct. 31, 2018

OnWednesday, October 31, 2018 at 5 p.m., theSelf-Portrait donated by Omar Galliani to the Uffizi will be presented in theVasari Auditorium of the Uffizi Galleries. The work will be exhibited during the conference Novelties at the Galleries. Don’t Stop Dreaming. Omar Galliani and his Self-Portrait.

The artist himself, in his brief reflection composed on the occasion of the presentation of the self-portrait, wrote, “Is it the sky that looks at me or am I being looked at by the sky?” Indeed, the monumental drawing (150 x 150 cm) highlights the strong connection between Galliani and the sky, punctuated by stars of various sizes: the latter also draw symbols and personal constellations, such as the Buddha, the dragon, the scissors, and the donkey jaw, which Marzia Faietti, coordinator of the Education, Research and Development Division, called “almost his patron saints.” Marzia Faietti adds, "Galliani’s works clearly show an intimate polarity in his art: the mimetic ability towards nature, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ability to dematerialize figures and objects through the technical solutions adopted. Technique and its perfect synthesis with style become in the painter docile instruments of a vision deprived of material density, where thears aemula naturae, after having apparently celebrated its highest apogee through the restitution of external semblances, gives way to the imperious coming of evocation, which finally has the upper hand over description."

The director of the Uffizi Galleries, Eike Schmidt, says, "Omar Galliani’s Self-Portrait is not the first drawing to have arrived in the Uffizi’s collection of self-portraits. Very famous examples, among the drawings that have come in the past, are two pastels: the first by an artist who brought that technique to heights of great virtuosity as Rosalba Carriera, and the second by Jean-Etienne Liotard, commissioned by Francis Stephen of Lorraine, husband of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, who sent it from Vienna to Florence in 1744. Still others have gradually flowed to the present day in the collection of self-portraits begun by Leopold de’ Medici, up to and including 20th-century and modern-day artists, both Italian (e.g., Achille Funi, Olga Carol Rama, Giulio Paolini) and foreign (Francis Picabia, Fernard Léger, Ernst Fuchs, Jean-Michel Folon...). But none of them has the same dimensions and the same, surprising, technique."

Omar Galliani's Self-Portrait donated to the Uffizi Galleries will be unveiled Oct. 31, 2018

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