Sean Horton (Presents) is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by American painter Peter Gallo — titled Blood & Flowers, the exhibition is the artist’s fifth solo presentation (and fifteenth project) with the gallery.

Sounding like the perfect album title “Blood & Flowers” is a collection of some of the artist’s favorite refrains: short, accumulated impastos laid upon raw linen, lines of nails or staples edging the supports, and evocative words and phrases that sample deeply internalized texts. Pastel pinks, blues and yellows rest upon glistening rabbit-skin glue and weathered found materials — almost any piece of wood at hand (previously functional or not) is deemed an appropriate support.

Heaven (2022) positions an inverted chair slightly above head height inviting the viewer to gaze upward towards the sky-blue-painted seat. Nearby, Driving and Crying (2017—2022) seats a small painting of a weeping figure in a chair; the scene is equal parts Marian apparition and late night intoxication. Across the room, fiat ars — pereat mundus (2018—2019) couples Walter Benjamin’s dictum “Let art be created, though the world perishes” with a crudely outlined Totenkopf.

In Sunday Painting (2022) the creamy words “Better Days” are written in hesitant, loafing cursive to a slab grey ground. Clusters of sunflower-colored brushstrokes gather along the bottom edge creating a vista that causes the text to recede to the horizon. Like red blood cells into white, a soothing Baker-Miller pink seems to infiltrate the purity of the letters. In Gallo’s hands, cadmium red becomes both material and content; the poppies from his dooryard and the Mystic Lamb’s chalice, American Red Cross and Malevich, or flowers and blood.

Peter Gallo (b. 1959, Rutland, VT) lives and works in Hyde Park, VT. He received a BA from Middlebury College, and an MA and a PhD in Art History from Concordia University, Montreal. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin; White Columns, New York; Horton Gallery (Sunday LES), New York; and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; among others. The gallery presented a solo booth of the artist’s work at The Independent Brussels in 2018 and a two-person exhibition The Patients and The Doctors with David Byrd in 2015. The artist’s work has been included in Artforum, the Village Voice, The New York Times, and Art in America, among others.