Collateral event 53rd International Art Exhibition
4th June – 15th August 2009 Sant’Apollonia Cloister

A vergin, her teeth, two great artists. This is the strange mix proposed by ‘Saint Apollonia, Omar Galliani and some teeth by Andy Warhol’, that is a collateral exhibition of Biennale held at Saint Apollonia Cloister, where the Diocese Museum of Venice is located. The story with macabre features of the martyr Saint Apollonia, has drawn everybody’s attention and has struck the imagination of many people for a long time. Andy Warhol’s one too: in 1984 he realized a series of artworks on paper entirely dedicated to the saint. Previously unseen and produced at the exhibition, those artworks represent her with pincers in her hands, as a symbol of martyrdom and then, automatically, as an obsession for teeth, the symbols related to them, the bite, taste, the features of faces.

For a long time Omar Galliani has been facing the contemporary representation of saints, an as he is carrying on his specific research on the elements making the human body, teeth, in his research, occupy a special place. It is nearly natural, then, the reference to Saint Apollonia. For this exhibition he has created seven artworks of big size in which he offers a personal interpretation of the Saint’s martyrdom: rains of teeth, teeth hanging from the sky, the tooth seen as a mystical, disturbing, astral element or even more explicitly sexual when put close to Saint Apollonia’s angelical face. TD