Michele Bubacco
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Bio
Michele Bubacco born in 1983 Venice, Italy
Lives and Works between Venice and Vienna
Selected Exhibitions
2016 Premio Fondazione VAF- Posizioni attuali dell’arte Italiana, Macro Testaccio, Rome.
Traveling to Stadtgalerie, Kiel and Kunstsammlung Chemnitz
Michele Bubacco: Serenade, David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe
Danse Macabre, Louis B. James Gallery, New York
2015 Group exhibition, Galerie Rompone, Cologne, curated by Claudia Cosmo
(Un)Real, David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe, curated by Mary Dinaburg
and Howard Rutkowski
5 x 5: Other Voices, Litvak Gallery, Tel Aviv, curated by Mary Dinaburg
and Howard Rutkowski
Bacan, Markhof 2 artspace, Vienna
Girotondo, Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi, Venice
2013 Bonjour Venezia, Bonjour Vedova, Ikona Gallery, Venice, curated by Max Piva
2012 Michele Bubacco, Litvak Gallery, Tel Aviv, essay by Ronan Barthes
2011 Michele Bubacco, Ventilazione, Vienna, curated by Max Piva
Paint It Black On The White Night- Wall Painting, Venice
2009 La Columbia International Art Award, second prize
2008 Esposizione prima: Ecco i giovanissimi, Villa Brandolini di Solighetto, Treviso,
curated by Francesco Michielin
Art Fairs
2015 Art Miami, David Richard Gallery
2014 Select, Miami
2012 SH Contemporary, Shanghai
Selected Publications
2014 Barbara Mader, “Michele Bubacco,” Kurier, Vienna
2013 Kathy Battista, ‘Michele Bubacco,’ Document Journal
2012 Alexander Forbes, “Michele Bubacco,” Modern Painters
Alexander Forbes, “Michele Bubacco, Interview,” ArtInfo
Artist Statement
Michele Bubacco creates some of the most confrontational, psychologically disturbing works. Their imagery is impossible to turn from. It fills the whole painting surface with its brutality and sexual imagery holding the center and foreground. The paintings, mostly black-and-white grotesques allude to artists ranging from Goya to Soutine and Guston. Gesture and abstraction drive the pained figures in his paintings. As Bubacco describes his canvas The Bite (2014): “You can recognize a spherical shape, it is cracked. Perhaps it was a head in the past, now it is evolving, is hooking, is penetrating, got stuck in a complementary figure, supine with a leg up. The relationship between these two elements could be inside the violence territory or inside the territory of the interrelationship.” These words most accurately mirror the passion and anguish of his imagery.
Barbara MacAdam, Senior Editor, Artnews
Gallery Statement / Profile
Michele Bubacco has a raw, visceral approach to painting, with deliberate strokes and a reductive palette that emphasizes the anguish and despair of the figures. His gestural and almost violent canvases present an implied narrative rife with psychological underpinnings and ambiguous sexuality and behavior. The figurative elements are fragmented, leaving the viewer with only a partial point of entry into the chaotic events seemingly taking place.
The works collectively, present a ‘story line’ of indeterminate Hogarthian activity and apparent dissolution as each canvas segues into the next. While there is no beginning and no end to this non-narrative, the multi-figure images may be considered the opening scenes to an enigmatic maelstrom of discomfort; with the paintings of single figures resultant vignettes, furthering the sense of darkness and mystery.
Bubacco has been called an ‘existentialist’ and in this there is the ring of truth. Surely, he is a descendent of artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Germaine Richier and Francis Bacon; and like them his figures struggle for self-definition amidst ambiguity in an age of doubt.
Born in 1983 Michele Bubacco is the son of the famous Murano glass artist, Lucio Bubacco, under whom he first learned his craft. From 2002 to 2004 he studied painting in Venice under Alessandro Rossi, before establishing his own studio in that city. In 2011 he presented his monumental painting Crimson Orchestra during the Venice Biennale. He has recently relocated to Vienna and has participated in exhibitions in Austria, Germany and Italy.
CV/BIO
Michele Bubacco is an autodidact born in 1983 on the island of Murano in Venice, where he still lives and works today. The island is renowned for its fine-glass industry, which dates back to the 13th century. The artistic language Bubacco has developed is permeated with the artistic influences he absorbed from his surroundings and especially from his father, the glass artist Lucio Bubacco. After studying painting with the Venetian artist Alessandro Rossi from 2002 until 2004 and gaining further expertise in glass-fusing with the artist Miriam Di Fiore in 2005, Bubacco opened a studio in Murano and began to take part in exhibitions in Italy and throughout Europe. A major highlight was the mounting of the monumental painting Crimson Orchestra at a satellite exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2011. The exhibition "Whitegray" focused on work from series painted during the past five years - including works he created during his stay in Israel in the months preceding the exhibition. The very large paintings carry on a dialogue with the rich history of Venice as a cultural center with hedonistic attributes, in an expressive painting language that reveals the distress and even violence that are bound up with pleasure.
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