A man screams, mouth torn open, head thrown back against a burning wall of orange-red. You have seen this before. Not this face, but this scream. It runs from Velázquez through Bacon and lands, seven years in the making, on the canvases Dante Galic brings to the Discovery Art Fair Frankfurt.
The face belongs to Harald. In 2019, in a Berlin bar called Herman Schultz, Galic fell into conversation with a stranger, a man of formidable intellect and a sorrow that would not lift. Somewhere in those long talks about art, cinema, and feeling, Harald described being alive as walking through a forest made of razor blades. That single image became a commission of sorts: to lend one man’s face to a pain most of us carry and few of us dare to name.
Dante Galic in his studio
From the Pope’s Chair to Bacon’s Cage
What began as a photographic collaboration in the studio soon reached for older company. Galic first posed Harald seated and frontal, an echo of Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, with authority, composure, the body arranged for posterity. Then the composure broke. The truer ancestor turned out to be Francis Bacon, and with him came a wholesale change of method: the fine lines and thin glazes gone, replaced by thick impasto, the palette knife, and reds that seem less applied than spilled. These are portraits that have stopped sitting still.
Dante Galic
A Storyteller Who Calls Himself a Weapon
Dante Galic (1996) is a Croatian-born, Odense-based, and entirely self-taught artist. He calls his style “Neo Grotesque,” where the Old Masters fused with Goya’s dread, a little surrealism, a debt to comics. He mixes his own pigments, stretches organic linen and hemp, and frames some works in upcycled Indonesian boat wood. The ecology is not a footnote; it is of a piece with a man who insists that art is “a weapon” and “a chronicle of our time,” not something to be matched to the color of a sofa.
Whether the Haralds are portraits at all is the better question. A single grieving stranger becomes, across seven years and a wall of open mouths, a mirror the rest of us are invited to stand in front of.
If you want to commiserate with Dante Galic’s Harald series, come to the Discovery Art Fair Frankfurt, from October 29 – November 1, 2026.
Dante Galic studio