Michele
Bubacco
Art can function as the shield that mirrors Perseus, who looks, locates and faces the Medusa: if he had looked directly at her, he would have remained petrified.”
Michele Bubacco
"Pictorial Metabolism" is the eccentric lexical invention with which Michele Bubacco defines his conceptual, excessive and radical artistic method. The Venetian painter sees the metaphorical sense of this analogy between painting and the human processes of food intake and digestion in the fact that even painting perceives everything it encounters as something usable, and that it also needs a continuous contribution of visual impressions to maintain but also to develop itself. The painter also continuously expels the products of his unconscious visual fantasy, as well as his traumatic-pulsifying ideas. All this, however, is expressed in the form of a continuous becoming, so that the thought that the artist may have already had concrete at the beginning of his creative work, is sometimes transformed through spontaneous confrontation with obsessive imagery and with the formal self-realisations of the pictorial process, and in the end something unexpected appears where originally you were looking for something else: for Bubacco, then, the process of pictorial invention is comparable to a "trial orchestra", as a free search for possibilities, intuitive improvisation. These aspects also determine the characteristic ductus of Bubacco's painting, which expresses itself in such an intense way and full of expressive energy that it can certainly be defined as the direct descendant of some of the great protagonists of an impetuous, impulsive, ecstatic, dionistic, maniacal and orgiastic pictorial vein. The artist does not only place exponents of recent modernity such as Emilio Vedova, with whom he has a particularly close relationship being also Venetian, or painters such as Chaim Soutine, Oskar Kokoschka, Alberto Giacometti, Maria Lassnig and Arnulf Rainer, but also ancient masters with spectacular brushstrokes, such as the late Titian, Tintoretto or even Goya. Bubacco's painting, however, originates from drawing which, by virtue of its special status, is much more than a preparatory phase for painting within the creative process. In Bubacco's drawings we find sketches of all those elements that we also value in his painting. For Bubacco, drawing is not only a means to record directly the sensations he receives from reality, but it also has in a certain sense the function of seismograph in fixing every minimum relation of his ego. The free, autonomous or even automatic actionism of the hand while drawing, in which the artist expresses the bizarre and whimsical birth of intelligence, thus enters into competition with the regulatory instance, which has its foundation in the rational faculties.
Klaus Wolbert
Biography
Michele Bubacco was born in 1983 in Venice, where he had his first experiences that marked him as a painter, encountering the works of the great Venetian masters of the past but also of contemporary protagonists. In 2015 he moved to Vienna. He currently resides and works on the Island of Murano in Venice.
Exhibitions
Among the main solo shows we remember:
Upcoming 2025
Solo Show, Alessandro Casciaro Venezia (I);
2021
Honolulu, Ikona Gallery, Venice (I)
2020
Love Me 2 Times, Song Song, Vienna (A)
Alphabet, Ikona Gallery, Venice (I)
Campo Visivo, Galerie Weihergut, Salzburg (A)
2019
It's Not a Finger, Song Song, Vienna (A)
2017
Michele Bubacco – F**k-simile, Galleria Alessandro Casciaro, Bolzano (I)
2016
Your bones, Galerie Rompone, Cologna (D)
Danse Macabre, Michele Bubacco e Monte Coleman, Louis B James Gallery, New York City (USA)
Serenade, David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe (USA)
2012
Whitegray, Litvak Gallery, Tel Aviv (Israel)
2011
Paesaggio italiano, Ventilazione, Vienna (A)
Paint it black on the white night – Wall painting, Ikona Gallery, Venezia (I)
He has also taken part in numerous group exhibitions, including:
2024
Salon Palermo 4, Rizzuto Gallery, Palermo (I)
Per grazia ricevuta, Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, Milano (I)
Wandering into this great Unknown, Cittadella degli Archivi Milano (I)
2023
Pittura Italiana oggi, Triennale Milano (I)
Come un’onda, come in volo, Museo Francesco Baracca, Lugo (I)
Affascinante, Museo Civico Luigi Varoli, Cotignola (I)
2022
L.ART Gallery, Salzburg (A)
Croisements, Cité Internationale Des Arts - Montmartre, Paris (F)
Who Killed Bambi, Dolomiti Contemporanee, Casso (I)
Girotondo, Litvak Contemporary, Curated By Hadas Glazer, Tel Aviv (Israel)
Special, L.Art Galerie, Salzburg (A)
2021
Bloodline: The Artist's Family, Litvak Contemporary, Tel Aviv (Israel) Winter Special, L.Art Galerie, Salzburg (A)
Saloon, Gli Occhi Mordenti, Katrin Plavčak, Vienna (A)
Galleria Alessandro Casciaro, Bolzano (I)
2019
L’intreccio Arabo-Normanno, Manifesta 12, Collateral Event, Palermo (I)
selvatico [14], Museo Civico San Rocco (I)
Il Bruco e la Farfalla, Palazzo delle Albere, Trento (I)
ESSERE CORPO, Kunsthalle West Eurocenter Lana (I)
Palermo Stupor Mundi, Strizzi Space, Cologna (D)
ANGRY BOYS, Museum Det Ny Kastet, Thisted, (DK) e Rompone Galerie, Cologna (D)
2018
Brain-tooling, Forte di Monte Ricco, Dolomiti Contemporanee (I)
2017
Manhood, Litvak contemporary, Tel Aviv (IL)
MAD COW, SCAG GALLERY, Vienna (A)
2016
Horizon, Litvak contemporary, Tel Aviv (IL)
Premio Fondazione VAF - Posizioni attuali dell’arte italiana, Chemnitz Museum of Art, Chemnitz (D), Stadtgalerie Kiel (D) e MACRO Testaccio, Museum of Contemporary Art Roma (I)
Un-becoming, Fridman gallery (USA)
Anaconda, Kulturkirche Ost, Cologna (D)
Autoselbstfahrer, Rompone Kunstsalon, Cologna (D)
2015
Bacan, Markhof 2, Vienna (A)
Stripped to Tease?, Locomot Contemporary Art, Vienna (A)
5 x 5: Other Voices, Litvak Contemporary, Tel Aviv (Israel)
(Un)Real, David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe (USA)
Cesare, quand’era Pavese, Galerie Rompone, Köln (D) e Associazione Alessandro Marena, Torino (I)
2013
Bonjour Venezia, Bonjour Vedova, Ikona Gallery, Venezia (I)
2008
Esposizione prima. Ecco i giovanissimi, Villa Brandolini di Solighetto, Treviso (I)
Related Exhibitions
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