This conversation introduces an artist whose practice moves fluidly between sculpture and image, shaped by an early dependence on drawing as a form of communication and later by studies at the Accademia di Brera with Alberto Garutti. Their work challenges the idea of the artwork as a closed object, instead proposing pieces that exist as perceptual states—open, unstable encounters that unfold between viewer, material, and space.
Working with silicone, resin, and hybrid surfaces, the artist explores tensions between the digital and the physical, familiarity and estrangement, precision and fragility. The interview reflects on intuition, trauma, and recurring questions as drivers of new bodies of work, while addressing broader concerns about ambiguity, narrative potential, and the ethical position of art in relation to the contemporary moment.
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KALI Gallery: How did you find your way to art and when did you realize you want to become an artist?
Michele Gabriele: My professional path took shape during my years at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, where I was a student of Alberto Garutti, a major Italian artist who passed away recently. It was there that I began to question not so much what to do, but how an artwork thinks, and to phocus on the space that it inhabits. As a passion, however, art entered my life very early. As a child, I communicated little through words and began speaking quite late; drawing became my primary language. At six or seven years old, I already considered myself a portraitist, and in a sense, I still am.My mother and my aunt, both art teachers, raised me through stories about the Italian Transavanguardia and the Nuovi Nuovi, having studied in their youth with some important figures from these movements. Through their accounts, I always felt a deep connection to that period, as if my roots were embedded in the 1980s. The art I most often think about while working is, in fact, that of the late 1980s, the 1990s, and the early 2000s, art that was happening while I was already alive.
KG: Your works often feel more like states or appearances than finished objects. What draws you to this kind of openness in an artwork?
MG: I am interested in problematizing the idea of the closed object: the artwork becomes something that happens in the space between the observer and what is observed, and exists within that tension. It does not resolve into a single reading, but activates a perceptual shift.I think of my works as portraits of themselves, captured in a significant moment of a hypothetical, decontextualized film. I am interested in leaving perceptual ground open: the forms do not offer immediate answers, but require time, slowing down, and attention. My gaze continuously oscillates between being too distant and too close.
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Michele GabrieleStudy for the head of a sleeping teenage triton, 2024Silicone, metal, glass, plastic19 3/4 x 35 3/8 x 23 5/8 in
50 x 90 x 60 cmKG: Many of your sculptures and images seem to oscillate between digital image logic and physical materiality. How does this tension influence your formal decisions?MG: This tension stems from a desire to explore a post-digital space, where materials such as silicone, resin, or everyday electronic components combine to generate figures that are familiar and yet alien. What emerges is a perceptual disorientation that compels the viewer to reconsider their visual experience. My poetics are permeated by an unmotivated nostalgia toward the present and the future.
KG: What role does intuition play in your working process, and at what point is it replaced or sharpened by analysis or conceptual precision?
MG: I begin with contradictory, strange, or seemingly useless elements, which only later translate into form. Recently, I have realized that, more than intuition, what is at play in my case is a strong permeability to trauma. Experiences that are not necessarily significant can affect me as deeply as events of greater magnitude; they align almost democratically in my mind. This leaves me unable to think about anything else until I explore them and transform them into a series, at least until the next trauma arrives.KG: Your bodies of work do not appear in isolation but often seem to respond to or extend one another. How do you recognize when a new phase of work is emerging?
MG: Not through a new technique or a new material, but through the emergence of new questions. -
Michele GabrielePortrait of a Parrot. An Unbothered, Sad, and Cringe Parrot. Indifferent to its Context., 2025Acrylic on canvas, artist frame51 1/8 x 37 3/8 in
130 x 95 cmKG: Materials such as silicone, epoxy resin, or hybrid surfaces recur throughout your practice. What interests you in their aesthetic and semantic charge?
MG: These materials carry a layered set of meanings, oscillating between the artificial and the organic. I am interested in their ability to retain a memory of use and imagery, suggesting something familiar that nonetheless cannot be fully grasped. They speak about our contemporary relationship with mediated experiences, surfaces suspended between function and representation.
KG: Your works often resist clear narrative readings. Is this ambiguity a conscious conceptual aim, or does it emerge organically from the process itself?
MG: On the contrary, it often seems to me that I suggest too much in narrative terms. A sculpture or a painting can only ever be a frame from a longer, more complex story. It is precisely the tension produced by what remains undeclared that interests me.KG: In the body of work that was also presented in Brambora, questions of presence and attribution play a central role. What was the conceptual starting point for these works?
MG: For that body of work, the starting point was a strong sense of discomfort. I asked myself whether there are historical moments in which it is acceptable, or perhaps necessary, to be redundant and rhetorical. -
KG: In what ways do your works respond to contemporary visual cultures—such as digital imagery, simulations, or virtual spaces—without directly representing them?
MG: Although I am not obsessed with contemporary visual culture, I pay close attention to what surrounds me during the creative process, including on an aesthetic level. Ultimately, my works pose questions just as much as they respond to stimuli coming from that context.KG: What role do titles play in your practice? Do they function as guides, disruptions, or autonomous layers of meaning?
MG: With titles, I feel I am extremely honest and generous: they reveal my way of thinking in a direct manner. They act as a beacon focused on one aspect of the work. They do not explain, but introduce a twist of meaning that integrates with visual perception and opens up further interpretative possibilities.KG: Your works often appear precisely articulated yet fragile at the same time. How do you navigate this tension during the process of making?
MG: Perhaps because I am interested in works being one thing and, at the same time, their exact opposite.
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KG: For collectors, understanding the process behind a work is often as important as the object itself. What should they know about how your works come into being?
MG: I am not sure they should know it. I am not particularly interested in collectors as such; their opinions matter to me only when their support has genuinely contributed, in a significant way, to the growth of my work.
That said, they might know that in the gaze of my paintings and in the poses of my sculptures, there is often the first gesture of an attempted dialogue. The works contain secrets: they are closed caskets that open over time. Sometimes it is in the evening, when you glance at them distractedly out of the corner of your eye, that their presence becomes perceptible. The artwork is not what we want it to be, nor what we say it is. Descriptions speak more about us than about the works themselves. The artworks will outlive us. And at times, they are the ones judging us.
KG: If you were to summarize your current practice, what central question is driving your work at this moment?
MG: Lately, my research has been shaped by this question: if we consider the purpose of an artwork as an attempt to perform an anamnesis of the contemporary, capable of reflecting contemporaneity even as time passes, aspiring to exist in every instant of an impossible perpetual present—how much ethical responsibility is there in remaining detached from what surrounds us? And, in parallel, how intellectually irrelevant can it be to focus exclusively on what is happening today, allowing oneself to be disturbed or inspired by the immediate present?
