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Michele Gabriele at Kunsthalle.Ost

October 8, 2022

Artist: Michele Gabriele

Exhibition title: With the corner of the Eye

Curated by: Elizaveta Shnyderman

Venue: Kunsthaus Langenthal, Langenthal, Switzerland

Date: September 24 – October 15, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Kunsthaus Langenthal

“With the corner of the Eye”, Kunsthalle.Ost presents the first solo exhibition of Milan based artist Michele Gabriele in Leipzig. For Kunsthalle.Ost, the artist has developed a scenario comprising four sculptural works and a site-specific drawing intervention. A narrative relationship develops between the individual objects; they become performers of themselves and view each other in the exhibition context.

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Inspired by the postures, gestures, attitudes, and poses that our bodies assume inhabiting the space of an exhibition, Michele Gabriele’s series of sculptures are proposals, proposals for what happens to a form when it is observed revealing itself as the sum total of all negligible details and distractions that an image can contain.

“With the corner of the eye” honors the uneasiness, that fragility, the social awkwardness that belongs to the subjects who inspire them. The sum total of all the negligible details and distractions that an image can contain presents itself in “With the corner of the eye”. The works exemplify the difficulty of a form to move away from the stereotype in inexplicably elicits. If forms are inexorably condemned to the stereotypes they evoke, then observation is a very un-passive act. The superhuman space of a form facilitates our acute governance over it as we reproduce its context. In other words, the category realism begins to include more than what resembles the real; it has to account for an invisible set of inputs which produce the parameterized picture of its reality.

Gabriele’s works are molds without their original-hyper sculpted visions referencing their own prototype-ness, practical effects, and nonchalance. The work recreates and reprograms the world in its own image, or the immanent possibilities of production made by rendering the natural world as consistent data. In other words: these works are pushed towards the future. But time here operates as a palimpsest. Inspiring common memory, the work on display constructs a fiction with no clear precedent in visual history. What does it mean to model something that never was-to shape unruly physical forms, and to model profoundly unachievable relations?

-Text by Elizaveta Shnyderman

Michele Gabriele (they-he) is an Italian Visual Artist who lives and works in Milan, Italy. His work has been presented at: ASHES/ASHES, New York; NAM, Manifattura Tabacchi, Florence; Anno Domini, New York; Studio E1, Paris; Alios 16ème Biennale dʼArt Contemporain, La Teste-de-Buch; Gossamer Fog, London; Buropolis, Marseille; Konstanet, Kunstihoone Art All, Tallinn; Fondazione Pini, Milan; Et al., San Francisco; Galeria da Boavista, Lisbon; Fondazione Spinola Banna, Turin; Marselleria Permanent Exhibition, Mil5n; Museo Carlo Zauli, Faenza.

Elizaveta Shneyderman is a New York-based curator, researcher. She is curator at the Riga Technoculture Research Unit (RTRU). Her essays on contemporary art and visual culture have been published in Artforum, Animation Studies Journal, BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail and Rhizome, among others.

Michele Gabriele, With the corner of the eye, 2022, exhibition view, Kunsthalle Ost, Leipzig

Michele Gabriele, I’m sitting here on the ground so I’ll remember it as a nice atmosphere / The difficulties of a form to move away from the stereotypes it evokes, 2021/2022, Silicone, wood, cotton, plastic, epoxy resin, metal, acrylic paint, 80 x 60 x 70 cm

Michele Gabriele, With the corner of the eye, 2022, exhibition view, Kunsthalle Ost, Leipzig

Michele Gabriele, With the corner of the eye, 2022, Charcoal drawings on carpet, Variable dimensions

Michele Gabriele, With the corner of the eye, 2022, exhibition view, Kunsthalle Ost, Leipzig

Michele Gabriele, I’m sitting here on the ground so I’ll remember it as a nice atmosphere / The difficulties of a form to move away from the stereotypes it evokes, 2021/2022, Silicone, synthetic clay, leather, wood, cotton, plastic, epoxy, metal, acrylic paint, brass, 90 x 130 x 80 cm

Michele Gabriele, With the corner of the eye, 2022, Charcoal drawings on carpet, Variable dimensions

Michele Gabriele, I’m sitting here on the ground so I’ll remember it as a nice atmosphere / The difficulties of a form to move away from the stereotypes it evokes, 2021/2022, Silicone, synthetic clay, leather, wood, cotton, plastic, epoxy, metal, acrylic paint, brass, 90 x 130 x 80 cm