Can Painting Hold a Body That Refuses to Settle? Michele Gabriele Between Image and Presence

The image looks back, not to explain itself, but to remain unresolved.

Michele Gabriele’s Practice Between Painting, Sculpture, and Performance

Michele Gabriele is an Italian visual artist based in Milan whose work unfolds across painting, sculpture, and performance. Rather than moving cleanly between media, the practice stays deliberately entangled, with forms migrating from one discipline into another.

Figures recur, disappear, and return altered, as if each work were a rehearsal rather than a conclusion. What emerges is not a stable iconography, but a world built from hesitation, misalignment, and physical presence.

Michele Gabriele . Detail of Study for the Plumage of a Parrot. An Unbothered, Sad, and Cringe Parrot. Indifferent to its Context , from the solo exhibition Brambora , KALI Gallery, Lucerne, Switzerland. Photo by Kim da Motta. Image courtesy of the artist and KALI Gallery.

Michele Gabriele . Study for the Plumage of a Parrot. An Unbothered, Sad, and Cringe Parrot. Indifferent to its Context , from the solo exhibition Brambora , KALI Gallery, Lucerne, Switzerland. Photos by Kim da Motta. Images courtesy of the artist and KALI Gallery.

Figures That Do Not Quite Belong

Across Gabriele’s work, bodies appear slightly out of sync with their surroundings. Hybrids, costumed figures, and anthropomorphic presences populate installations and images, never fully absorbed by the spaces they inhabit.

These figures do not function as symbols to be decoded. They operate instead as unstable carriers of meaning, shaped by context, display, and the expectations brought to them by the viewer. The work consistently resists narrative closure, leaving interpretation suspended.

Michele Gabriele . Installation view from I see you repeating this, I warn you in the sweetest way , solo exhibition curated by Carles Àngel Saurí at EACC, Castellón de la Plana, Spain, featuring acrylic on canvas and painted wooden structure, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist, Ashes/Ashes, New York, and EACC.

Michele Gabriele . Egolatra VI , 2023, mixed media sculpture composed of silicone, resin, acrylic color, fabric, plastic, plaster, graphite, and found objects, exhibited in I see you repeating this, I warn you in the sweetest way , EACC, Castellón de la Plana, Spain. Images courtesy of the artist and Ashes/Ashes, New York.

Michele Gabriele . Egolatra IV , 2022, epoxy clay, concrete, acrylic paint, embossed copper, feathers, metal, wood, and found objects, from With the Corner of the Eye , Kunsthalle.Ost, Leipzig, Germany. Image courtesy of the artist and Ashes/Ashes, New York.

Material as a Site of Tension

Material choices play a central role in this instability. Whether working with paint, fabric, wood, or drawing, Gabriele treats surface as something active rather than illustrative.

Michele Gabriele , installation view from the solo exhibition Brambora at Kaly Gallery, Lucerne, Switzerland, 2025. Photo by Kim da Motta. Image courtesy of the artist and Kali Gallery.

Michele Gabriele , Study for the Plumage of a Parrot. An Unbothered, Sad, and Cringe Parrot. Indifferent to its Context , acrylic and mixed media on canvas, from the solo exhibition Brambora at Kaly Gallery, Lucerne, Switzerland, 2025; installation views, Photos by Kim da Motta, images courtesy of the artist and Kali Gallery.

Michele Gabriele , detail of Study for the Plumage of a Parrot. An Unbothered, Sad, and Cringe Parrot. Indifferent to its Context , acrylic and mixed media on canvas, from the solo exhibition Brambora at Kaly Gallery, Lucerne, Switzerland, 2025, photo by Kim da Motta, image courtesy of the artist and Kali Gallery.

Michele Gabriele. Detail. Image courtesy of the artist

Paint accumulates in visible strokes, textures interrupt illusion, and structural elements remain exposed. The works insist on their own making. Representation is never smooth enough to disappear into image, and materiality never settles into pure objecthood. The friction between the two is where the work lives.

Painting as a Physical Encounter

In recent years, painting has become an increasingly direct site for these concerns. Large scale canvases and painterly structures emphasize gesture, weight, and accumulation over finish.

Brushstrokes remain legible, sometimes clashing or collapsing into one another. Color behaves less as description and more as event, changing with light, distance, and movement. Painting becomes a physical encounter, something to be navigated rather than simply viewed.

Michele Gabriele . Portrait of a Parrot. An Unbothered, Sad, and Cringe Parrot. Indifferent to its Context , from the solo exhibition Brambora , KALI Gallery, Lucerne, Switzerland. Photo by Kim da Motta. Image courtesy of the artist and KALI Gallery.Michele Gabriele . Portrait of a Parrot. An Unbothered, Sad, and Cringe Parrot. Indifferent to its Context , 2025, acrylic on canvas in artist’s frame. Image courtesy of the artistMichele Gabriele. The artists studio. Image courtesy of the artist.

Brambora as a Condensed Chapter

This broader practice comes into sharp focus in Brambora , presented in 2025 at KALI Gallery in Lucerne. The exhibition centers on paintings and studies featuring parrots, figures that condense many of Gabriele’s long-standing concerns.

Here, the parrot is not an emblem but a temporary vehicle. It allows questions of perception, visibility, and projection to surface with particular clarity. The birds stare back, awkward and excessive, occupying too much space and blocking the exhibition itself.

Michele Gabriele. Portrait of a Parrot. An Unbothered, Sad, and Cringe Parrot. Indifferent to its Context , from the solo show Brambora at Kaly Gallery, Lucerne, CH, 2025, acrylic on canvas, artist frame, courtesy of the artist and Kali Gallery, photos by Kim da Motta.

Michele Gabriele . Portrait of a Parrot. An Unbothered, Sad, and Cringe Parrot. Indifferent to its Context , from the solo show Brambora at Kaly Gallery, Lucerne, CH, 2025, acrylic on canvas, artist frame, courtesy of the artist and Kali Gallery, photos by Kim da Motta.

Looking, Being Looked At

The parrot paintings draw on the language of portraiture, yet refuse its social contract. Instead of offering access, they obstruct it. The viewer becomes aware of their own gaze, of the desire to read, categorize, and consume the image.

This dynamic echoes a recurring tension throughout Gabriele’s work, where figures seem aware of being observed but remain indifferent to interpretation. The image does not perform for the viewer. It persists.

Studies, Gesture, and Exposure

Alongside the portraits, the Study for the Plumage of a Parrot works extend the practice into a more open, process-driven register. These paintings and mixed media works abandon predefined composition in favor of accumulation and gesture.

Fabric, paint, and surface interact without hierarchy. If the portraits feel like mirrors hung in public spaces, these studies resemble mirrors left in the studio, carrying traces of doubt, repetition, and physical labor.

Michele Gabriele. On view in his studio: L’Addio, 2024 Acrylic on canvas in artist’s frame, 91.5 x 81.5 x 6 cm image courtesy of the artist.Michele Gabriele Studio view. Image courtesy the artistMichele Gabriele , July 2nd, 2024, silicone, resin, acrylic colors, fabric, plastic, metal, plaster, graphite, 155 × 50 × 50 cm, from the group show To Romanticize with Indecision , curated by Monia Ben Hamoude and Michele Gabriele at Cassina Projects, Milan, Italy, photo by Roberto Marossi, courtesy of the artist and Ashes/Ashes, New York, NY.

Drawing as a Quiet Shift

The exhibition concludes with La colpa , a graphite drawing that brings a parrot into proximity with a triton from earlier bodies of work. The encounter feels tentative and intimate.

Observation gives way to closeness. This shift toward drawing underscores another constant in Gabriele’s practice, the ability to move between spectacle and quietness without resolving either. The drawing opens a narrative rather than closing one.

Michele Gabriele , “La colpa”; from the Solo Show “Brambora” at Kali Gallery, Lucerne, CH, Pencil on paper, 21cm x 29.7cm, 2025. Courtesy of the Artist and Kali Gallery. Photo by Kim da MottaMichele Gabriele. Studio view showing contemporary figurative paintings and works in progress. Image courtesy of the artist

Michele Gabriele. Pencil on paper. Image courtesy of the artist.

Why This Work Matters

Michele Gabriele’s work matters because it insists on uncertainty as a productive condition. At a time when images are expected to declare meaning quickly and clearly, the practice slows perception down.

By keeping figures unresolved and materials exposed, the work resists the flattening effects of consumption and categorization. It asks viewers to remain with ambiguity, not as a failure of meaning, but as a space where attention can deepen.

Michele Gabriele , installation view from the solo show Brambora at Kaly Gallery, Lucerne, CH, 2025, image courtesy of the artist and Kali Gallery.Michele Gabriele. Installation view from the solo exhibition Brambora , KALI Gallery, Lucerne, Switzerland, 2025. Photo by Kim da Motta. Image courtesy of the artist and KALI Gallery.Michele Gabriele , Portrait of a Parrot. An Unbothered, Sad, and Cringe Parrot. Indifferent to its Context (detail), from the solo show Brambora at Kaly Gallery, Lucerne, CH, 2025, acrylic on canvas, artist frame, courtesy of the artist and Kali Gallery, photo by Kim da Motta.

Recent Exhibitions and Trajectory

In 2025 , Michele Gabriele presented Brambora , his first solo exhibition in Switzerland, at KALI Gallery in Lucerne, a painting-focused project that condensed long-standing questions of perception and material presence. This followed earlier formative exhibitions at MeetFactory in Prague and Manifattura Tabacchi in Florence, where staging, embodiment, and hybrid figures were already central.

He has also taken part in selected institutional group exhibitions at MAH Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva and the ICA Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine.

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