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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Follow 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.