Michele Gabriele (they/them) (Fondi, LT, Italy) is an artist currently residing in Milan. Their academic background includes a Master’s in Visual Arts from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, as well as a period of study at Paris 8 University.  Gabriele is recognized mostly for their sculptures, paintings, and performances that irreverently and personally question the stakes of the contemporary post-digital world.

Their work addresses the contrast between the digital and material worlds, exploring the feeling of inadequacy engendered by progressive visions of an eco-sustainable future against the disillusionment of their concrete realization. Gabriele’s work is deeply rooted in exploring the distances between representation and materiality, as well as the divergences between space and time relative to the observer.

Michele Gabriele’s work explores the distance between the observer and the work of art in the constant search for a balance between representation and materiality, space and time, an obsolescent past and a dystopian future.
Fascinated by the concept of distance, Michele Gabriele is interested in the kind of “timelessness” that develops with a view from far away.
It offers the viewer the possibility to experience and develop a critical and reciprocal relationship with the artwork itself, with each other, and with the world.

Michele Gabriele’s work tells us about the roles and meanings of contemporary art, at times highlighting the contradictions and carelessness of an often corrupt and patronizing system and comparing it to a world in danger: ruined and condemned by climate change, environmental degradation, and their manifold effects;
showing us a vision of a future or a past that is distant and unknown yet strangely familiar, towards which we cannot help but feel, at times, sorry and nostalgic.

Through a gaze that could be defined as post-digital hyper-materialism, Michele Gabriele’s work is constantly moving, now drawing on a progressive vision of the future and its new sustainable technologies, while looking with disillusionment at the impossibility of a concrete realization of a technological and eco-sustainable future, and the fight against climate change and capitalism; now looking at the rubble that this dream leaves behind, as elements of self-generated forms, created from their own sense of inadequacy and misunderstanding.
An uncertain vision seems to have transformed the works themselves, from compact and invincible materials to discarded, forgotten, and misunderstood objects, victims of an ambiguous environment and its social disorder, yet illuminated by the light of a warm and bright sun.
Always present in Michele Gabriele’s practice is an attempt to balance a spasmodic activity of addition with a less visible but very important one of subtraction.

Molded and painted sculptural parts are often placed side by side with found objects and existing components. These two natures of the work merge completely, giving it a certain ambiguity and relieving it of its formal weight and the redundancy inherent in techniques and gestures.
Elements of difficult perishability, such as plastic materials and electronic components, salvaged and discarded, are inserted (subtracting them from the complex and often unsuccessful recycling system) into the works arbitrarily and evoke specific imaginaries.

Michele Gabriele’s work is the perfect portrait of a generation and a specific cultural environment, echoing a great nostalgic power. Having grown up between the ’80s and ’90s, Michele Gabriele formalizes a wide range of elements that seem to have been generated by a child who, left alone rummaging in an old attic or an abandoned laboratory, creates an awkward and improbable life out of a huge microscope slide that has been forgotten for a long time.

Michele Gabriele graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera.

He recently participated in the following exhibitions:: MiArt w/ Ashes/Ashes, (Solo Booth), Milan, IT (2024); Kin at Spirit Vessel, Espinavessa, ES (2024); Odyssea - Acte II : Le sel de la terre, Spiaggia Libera, Paris, F (2024)
Odyssea - Acte I : Le chant des sirènes, Spiaggia Libera, Marseille, F (2024); To Romanticize with Indecision, at Cassina Project, Milan, IT (2024);ENTER, Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art and DesignPortland, Maine US (2024); Walking Our Distance, MeetFactory, Prague, CH (2023); Jeudi au MAH, Performance, Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneve, CH (2023); Local Objects, International Objects, New York, NY, USA (2023); WITH THE CORNER OF THE EYE, Kunsthalle Ost, Leipzig, DE (2022); About Boundaries and other things, Lower Cavity, Holyhoke, MA, USA (2022); Remarkably Clear, Almost Invisible,
Michele Gabriele/Monia Ben Hamouda, AshesonAshes, New York, NY, USA (2022)
With a glad heart, DarkZone, New Jersey, US (2021); Stampede, Horse & Pony, Berlin, DE (2021); Endless Nostalghia, Museo Pecci Prato, IT - (2020).

His works are part of public collections:
FRAC CORSICA Corte FR (2024)
Enea Tree Museum Zurich, CH (2024)