GALLI giovanni

1954 . florence . italy

GALLI.Giovanni.2198   GALLI.Giovanni.2200

After high school, Giovanni Galli worked first as a cosmetics and perfumes representative for the family company and then took a variety of odd jobs. His first psychological issues surfaced after his parents died, and they worsened rapidly. Committed to the Psychiatric Hospital of Florence in 1993, he joined La Tinaia Studio there the following year. In the specialized hospital studio, he devoted himself to the passion that he had had since childhood (perhaps under the influence of his father, an amateur painter): drawing. Most of his compositions, which are laid out in comic-book style, were produced on the front and back of sheets of paper. One side was populated by women in scanty clothing in suggestive poses, alongside military or space vehicles. On the other side, the drawings—no doubt made in his residential institution—were usually more conventional. Very often, text enhanced the groupings, and so did collages of advertising photographs taken from magazines. Galli often chose close-ups of the female body (e.g., a pair of legs wearing high heels), which he glued to the center of his drawings as the focal point around which he added other drawn images of the female body, sometimes in poses suggesting sadism.