Alessandro Gallicchio

Director of the History of Art Department (since 2025)
Fellow at the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici (2024 – 2025)
Bio

Alessandro Gallicchio (1986, Italy) is a lecturer in contemporary art history at Sorbonne University, a member of the André-Chastel Centre, and an associate researcher at CETOBaC. He holds a PhD in art history from the universities of Florence, Paris-Sorbonne, and Bonn (2016), and he pursues his research through methodologies developed by the social and political history of art. His initial work focused on the influence of nationalism and antisemitism in the construction of artistic discourse. He later turned to examining how totalitarian regimes express propaganda not only through art criticism but also within the urban space. Starting from the material traces left by Italian fascism in the colonized Balkans, he conducted a study on the production and interpretation of “dissonant heritages.” This work led him to investigate processes of monumentalization and the visual strategies employed by colonialism, themes he explores through art geography and postcolonial perspectives. He is currently studying the emergence of a new generation of painters developing a sensitivity to representations of “urbanities” in the Mediterranean and the Balkans. In 2021, he was awarded the André Chastel fellowship at the Villa Medici. He is a fellow at the French Academy in Rome from September 2024 to April 2025.

Her residency project is devoted to writing a book on Edi Hila. Adopting a transnational and transdisciplinary perspective, his project analyzes the work of an artist who has always sought to capture the ambiguities and complexities of contemporary Albania. Sensitive to spatialities and a keen observer of the socio-political changes that have marked this country, Hila has developed a language that could be described as “paradoxical realism”, and which will be at the heart of this historical rereading with a critical dimension.