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  "description": "Michele Gabriele works across painting, sculpture, and performance, building figures that test perception, materiality, and the instability of identity",
  "path": "/michele-gabriele-artist/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-09T19:05:37.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.munchiesart.club",
  "tags": [
    "**Michele Gabriele**",
    "**KALI Gallery in Lucerne**",
    "**KALI Gallery** in Lucerne",
    "**MeetFactory**",
    "**Manifattura Tabacchi**",
    "**MAH Musée d’art et d’histoire**",
    "**ICA Institute of Contemporary Art**",
    "**Michele Gabriele on Instagram**",
    "**website**",
    "**michelegabriele.com**"
  ],
  "textContent": "> _The image looks back, not to explain itself, but to remain unresolved._\n\n## Michele Gabriele’s Practice Between Painting, Sculpture, and Performance\n\n\n**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.\n\nFigures 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.\n\n****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.\n\n****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.\n\n## Figures That Do Not Quite Belong\n\nAcross 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.\n\nThese 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.\n\n****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.\n\n****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.\n\n****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.\n\n## Material as a Site of Tension\n\nMaterial 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.\n\n****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.\n\n****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.\n\n****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.\n\n****Michele Gabriele****. Detail. Image courtesy of the artist\n\nPaint 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.\n\n## Painting as a Physical Encounter\n\nIn 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.\n\nBrushstrokes 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.\n\n****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 artist****Michele Gabriele.**** The artists studio. Image courtesy of the artist.\n\n## Brambora as a Condensed Chapter\n\nThis 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.\n\nHere, 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.\n\n****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.\n\n****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.\n\n## Looking, Being Looked At\n\nThe 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.\n\nThis 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.\n\n## Studies, Gesture, and Exposure\n\nAlongside 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.\n\nFabric, 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.\n\n****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 artist****Michele 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.\n\n## Drawing as a Quiet Shift\n\nThe 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.\n\nObservation 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.\n\n****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 Motta****Michele Gabriele****. Studio view showing contemporary figurative paintings and works in progress. Image courtesy of the artist\n\n****Michele Gabriele****. Pencil on paper. Image courtesy of the artist.\n\n### Why This Work Matters\n\nMichele 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.\n\nBy 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.\n\n****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.\n\n## Recent Exhibitions and Trajectory\n\nIn **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.\n\nHe 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.\n\n* * *\n\nFollow **Michele Gabriele on Instagram** and also dont miss his **website****michelegabriele.com** spend time with the work beyond its most visible motifs, then share this feature with someone who trusts images too easily.",
  "title": "Can Painting Hold a Body That Refuses to Settle? Michele Gabriele Between Image and Presence",
  "updatedAt": "2026-02-10T09:18:20.293Z"
}