Michele Bubacco

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

Résumé:

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.