Renzo Galeotti
The artist Renzo Galeotti was born in Carrara and studied painting and sculpture before teaching in Cagliari. He then moved to London where he dedicated himself entirely to painting and where he lived until his death in 2024. In 2005 he moved to a new studio in Teddington, on the Thames, where, every six months, he exhibited his new works to collectors.
His paintings, prints and drawing have been exhibited across the UK and Europe, including Bologna, Carrara, Edinburgh, Krakow, London, Liverpool, Lodz, Milan and Turin.
He was especially well known for his cycles of paintings representing the Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci and the author and Holocaust-survivor Primo Levi. Fourteen of his etchings are exhibited in the Auschwitz Museum and three of his paintings are in the Krakow Jagiellonskiego Museum’s European Master’s collection. Renzo, by Feliks Topolski (1975)
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His art was featured in the British TV produced film Antonio Gramsci (1987) and in 1990 Polish TV produced Renzo Galeotti’s Primo Levi, a programme dedicated to his work. He wrote in Marxism Today.
Many critics, scholars and fellow artists have written about his work, including Renato Guttuso, RB Annis, Feliks Topolski, Emanuel Cooper, Roderick Bisson, Merete Bates, Georgio Origlia, Peter Vansittart, Prof. Stanislaw Waltos, Richard Walker, Hamish Henderson, Anna Esden-Tempska, Marta Sktofisz, Roberto Pattina and Marcus Harrison. Articles on him have appeared in the Guardian, La Nazione, La Stampa, L’Unita, Dzievnik Polski, Marxism Today, Krakova, the Morning Star, the Echo, the Liverpool Post, Tribune, Praxis, Il Mattino, Il Tirreno, Cencrasstus, La Chimica e L’Industria, Kurier, Stuka and other newspapers and periodicals.
Notable works of his include the commissioned portrait of Professor Adam Bielanski of the Krakow Jagiellonian University, which is now on public display in the Krakow Jagiellonian Museum, a series of depictions of twentieth-century autocrats (which featured in Peter Vansittart‘s book Dictators), his portrait of Communist writer and historian James Klugmann (now in the collection of the People’s History Museum, Manchester, a gift of the Communist Party of Great Britain), further portraits and interpretations of modern authors and thinkers and numerous other works now in private collections
