Peter Gallo
Mariel Capanna
Installation view, Peter Gallo: Gods, Sluts & Martyrs, Adams and Ollman, 2025
Working from his studio in Hyde Park, Vermont, Peter Gallo creates what critics have termed “grunge arte povera”—layered compositions across painting, collage, sculpture and drawing, which transform discarded materials into profound meditations on time, language and the human condition.
Peter Gallo, Menace & Prayer (Rimbaud/P. Smith), 2025, oil on fabric on board, 23h x 23w in, 58.42h x 58.42w cm
Gallo’s painterly assemblages layer collections of fabric scraps, photocopied imagery, and found materials, including broken chairs, antique cutting boards, rusty baking pans, and old books, into informal compositions. Atop these well-worn materials, each with its own history, Gallo intervenes with a tumult of thick paint, often in shades of red and pink, building up marks sometimes over many years. Like uncanny artifacts from some anterior future, these works contain a multiplicity of time: they feel both new and old, quick and slow, slapdash and carefully, ritually assembled.
Gallo’s aesthetic is anarchic and anti-establishment in its play with text and materials, repurposing meaning to turn authority on its head—a form of cultural resistance that challenges both artistic conventions and broader social-political structures. His painterly assemblages incorporate references to Catholic mysticism, art history, pop songs, and literature, often featuring poetic text applied by pushing paint through a syringe.
“Gallo’s acute awareness of our sacrificial economy fuses human wretchedness with our capacity for love—leveling any distinctions between gods, sluts, and martyrs to remind us we are all one and the same.”
DJ Hellerman, for Artforum
Peter Gallo, St. Sebastian, 2023, oil and buttons on canvas stapled to panel, 24h x 19 1/2w in, 60.96h x 49.53w cm
Peter Gallo, Possession, 2023–2025, oil, acrylic, and inkjet prints on found wood, 51 1/2h x 33w in, 130.81h x 83.82w cm
Installation view, Peter Gallo: Gods, Sluts & Martyrs, Adams and Ollman, 2025
oil and mixed media on found wood
16h x 35w in
40.64h x 88.90w cm
oil on canvas
24h x 20w in
60.96h x 50.80w cm
oil on linen on board
19h x 26w in
48.26h x 66.04w cm
ink on paper
11h x 8 1/2w in
27.94h x 21.59w cm
ink on paper
11h x 8 1/2w in
27.94h x 21.59w cm
ink on paper
11h x 8 1/2w in
27.94h x 21.59w cm
ink on handmade Goldenrod paper
11h x 8 1/2w in
27.94h x 21.59w cm
ink on paper
8 1/2h x 11w in
21.59h x 27.94w cm
collage on paper
8 1/2h x 14w in
21.59h x 35.56w cm
Peter Gallo (b. 1959, Rutland, VT; lives and works in Hyde Park, VT) received a BA from Middlebury College and an MA and PhD in Art History from Concordia University, Montreal. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, and White Columns, New York. Gallo’s work has been highlighted in publications including Artforum, The Village Voice, The New York Times, and Art in America.
Installation view, Mariel Capanna: Commonplace, Adams and Ollman, 2025
Mariel Capanna’s paintings might be best understood as an exercise in remembering, a meditation on time and a reflection of loss and longing. Guided by self-imposed time constraints, Capanna paints in real time as she watches a moving image—sometimes a film, other times a slideshow or video—capturing an object, a color, a feeling as it comes into view.
For this new body of work, the artist watched 8mm home movies of family vacations and road trips anonymously uploaded to YouTube and raced to paint what she saw.
Each painting is made with a distinct palette that she mixes ahead of time. “I glean these palettes from daily life,” she explains. “One was gathered from an afternoon outside with [my son] Horace—t-shirt, shorts, helmet, scooter, sneakers, socks, grass, gravel. One was borrowed from an album cover; one is from a postcard that I received; a few are plucked from paintings that were on my mind.”
Marked by dense accumulations of vibrant color, impasto paint and gestural marks, each work contains allusions to the images and notations that represent the iconography of the American road trip: streams, seas, fences, patches of grass, flowering bushes, sun hats, palm fronds, meadows, mountains, sand banks and birthday cakes. Within each canvas, shifting views glimpsed through multiple car windows and camera lenses are condensed into the picture plane, allowing the long road, seasonal changes, wide-ranging activities and encounters and myriad places to collapse into a single image.
Mariel Capanna, Helicopter, Meadowsweet, Cattleguard, Fence, 2025, oil and marble dust on linen„ 40h x 30w in, 101.60h x 76.20w cm
Installation view, Mariel Capanna: Commonplace, Adams and Ollman, 2025
Mariel Capanna, Piling, Ship, Sign, Sand, 2005, oil and marble dust on linen, 13h x 11w in, 33.02h x 27.94w cm
Mariel Capanna, Stepladder, Waterfall, High-Rise, Road, 2025, oil and marble dust on linen on panel, 13h x 11w in, 33.02h x 27.94w cm
“With all of my paintings, I’m asking: when strung together, can a series of incomplete views, clunky translations, misremembered moments, flattened experiences, and oversimplifications yield something new that’s still meaningful in its own right?”
Mariel Capanna
oil and marble dust on linen
40h x 30w in
101.60h x 76.20w cm
oil and marble dust on linen on panel
13h x 11w in
33.02h x 27.94w cm
oil and marble dust on linen on panel
13h x 11w in
33.02h x 27.94w cm
oil on linen on panel
13h x 11w in
33.02h x 27.94w cm
oil and marble dust on linen on panel
13h x 11w in
33.02h x 27.94w cm
oil and marble dust on linen on panel
13h x 11w in
33.02h x 27.94w cm
Mariel Capanna (b. 1988, Philadelphia, PA) received a BFA and Certificate of Fine Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT. She has been an artist in residence at the Guapamacátaro Art and Ecology Residency, Michoacan, MX; the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME; and the Tacony Library and Arts Building, Philadelphia, PA. Capanna is the recipient of the Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Traveling Fellowship and an Independence Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship. From 2021-2023, Capanna was the Mellon Post-MFA Fellow in Studio Art at Williams College, Williamstown, MA, and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, and a Fresco Instructor at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME. Capanna’s solo exhibition, Giornata, is currently on view at the Clark Institute, Williamstown, MA, and in 2026, Capanna will be the subject of a MATRIX exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT.