Michele Gabriele at MeetFactory

Artist: Michele Gabriele

Exhibition title: Walking Our Distance

Curated by: Ján Gajdušek

Venue: MeetFactory, Prague, The Czech Republic

Date: December 1, 2023 – January 28, 2024

Photography: Jan Kolský, Michele Gabriele / images copyright and courtesy of the artist and MeetFactory, Prague

In a manner similar to the partnership between individuals in a relationship, evolving over time with varying intensity, energy, and passion, Michele Gabriele constructs a relationship between his works and the viewer. Here, we become partners in an unspoken narrative partly constructed by the author and partly expanded by our own imagination. We slowly explore the contours, surfaces, and layers with our eyes, attempting to feel and dream, to understand and approach the entire arc of the story both rationally and emotionally. However, all we have at our disposal is a fragment resembling the culmination of a dramatic situation, whose beginning and climax are buried in the depths of possible events. It is solely up to us how deeply we can immerse ourselves, how long we can hold our breath, and navigate its ambiguous boundaries. Simultaneously, everything relies on the degree of trust invested in our spectator consciousness through works as witnesses to the story—the more and stronger their impact, the closer we find ourselves as partners on the metaphorical trajectory of a mutual relationship.

The exhibition Walking Our Distance by Italian artist Michele Gabriele intentionally continues the narrative using mythologized references to a pre-apocalyptic world remarkably close to our own. Gabriele’s hypermaterial objects are distorted syntheses of countless forms that have existed in the past. Deliberately overwhelming our stereotypes with an overloaded visual imagination and with irony referring to the popcultural retro aesthetics of Hollywood films from the 1980s (from Ninja Turtles and Jurassic Park to Star Wars or The Dark Crystal), they speak to us from an uncertain reality of the future. Similar to his approach in sculpture, Gabriele applies a new technique in painting, considering it as an anonymized cluster of layers of all existing techniques and forms of this medium. He attempts to create a situation of antiauthorship or endless appropriation of forms, deliberately suppressing his own handwriting and calling it a portrait of painting. In essence, he approaches the method of creation that artificial intelligence employs in imagemaking.

The Prague exhibition follows the concurrently running exhibition of Michele Gabriele, I see you repeating this, I warn you in the sweetest way, at the Espai d‘Art Contemporani de Castelló gallery in Valencia, Spain.

Sculptor, painter and performer Michele Gabriele (*1983) is a graduate of the Accademia di Brera in Milan. He has presented solo exhibitions at EACC (Valencia, 2023), Kunsthalle Ost (Leipzig, 2022), NAM Museum, Manifattura Tabacchi (Florence, 2022), Ashes/Ashes Gallery, (New York, 2022), Gossamer Fog (London, 2019), and has also been included in group exhibitions at MAH Museum of Art and History (Geneve 2023), International Ob jects (New York 2023), Buropolis (Marseille 2021), A.D. Gallery (New York, 2020), Et. Al Gallery (San Francisco, 2018), O.J. Art Space (Istanbul, 2017), 9th Berlin Biennale (Berlin, 2016), among others.

Michele Gabriele, Walking Our Distance, 2023, exhibition view, MeetFactory, Prague. Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, Study for a teen triton’s head, 2023, Drawings on paper, size: 42,5 x 32 cm (each); Installation view from Walking Our Distance, at MeetFactory, Prague, Czech Republic; Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, Walking Our Distance, 2023, exhibition view, MeetFactory, Prague. Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, July 2nd, 2023, Silicone, resin, acrylic colors, fabric, plastic, plaster, graphite, found objects, size: 160 x 85 x 74 cm; Installation view from Walking Our Distance, at MeetFactory, Prague, Czech Republic; Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, Walking Our Distance, 2023, exhibition view, MeetFactory, Prague. Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, Study for a teen triton’s head, 2023, Drawing on paper, size: 32,5 x 23 cm; Installation view from Walking Our Distance, at MeetFactory, Prague, Czech Republic; Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, Walking Our Distance, 2023, exhibition view, MeetFactory, Prague. Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, Study for a painting, 2023, Drawing on paper, size: 52,5 x 73 cm; Installation view from Walking Our Distance, at MeetFactory, Prague, Czech Republic; Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, Walking Our Distance, 2023, exhibition view, MeetFactory, Prague. Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, Remains imprinted / Deforms perspective, 2023, Plaster, fabrics, graphite, size: 80 x 60 x 50 cm; Installation view from Walking Our Distance, at MeetFactory, Prague, Czech Republic; Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, Walking Our Distance, 2023, exhibition view, MeetFactory, Prague. Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, Study for a teen triton’s head, 2023, Drawing on paper, size: 42,5 x 32 cm; Installation view from Walking Our Distance, at MeetFactory, Prague, Czech Republic; Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, Study for “estremi per un paesaggio disonesto”, 2023, Drawing on paper, size: 52,5 x 73 cm; Installation view from Walking Our Distance, at MeetFactory, Prague, Czech Republic; Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, Walking Our Distance, 2023, exhibition view, MeetFactory, Prague. Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, Through a window or a mirror, 2023, Acrylic paint and charcoal on PVC, size: 300 x 250 cm; Installation view from Walking Our Distance, at MeetFactory, Prague, Czech Republic; Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, Walking Our Distance, 2023, exhibition view, MeetFactory, Prague. Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, Walking our distance, 2023, Acrylic paint and charcoal on PVC, size: 300 x 250 cm; Installation view from Walking Our Distance, at MeetFactory, Prague, Czech Republic; Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes

Michele Gabriele, Walking Our Distance, 2023, exhibition view, MeetFactory, Prague. Courtesy of the Artist and Ashes/Ashes