CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Michelle Molinari

Upcoming Exhibitions

Michelle Molinari has just been announced as a Finalist in the 2024 Dobell Drawing Prize. The Dobell Drawing Prize is Australia’s leading prize for drawing, an unparalleled celebration of technique, innovation and expanded practice. Presented at the National Art School in partnership with the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation, this biennial exhibition continues to highlight the enduring relevance and changing role of drawing within contemporary art practice.

Michelle Molinari is a painter, taxidermist and installation artist whose practice explores notions of death, fleeting beauty and the act of commemoration. Drawing upon traditions of taxidermic representation and European still life painting, Molinari works across various media to blur the boundaries between the inanimate and corporeal and to question ideas of aesthetic value.

Through the creation of her own taxidermy subjects, which serve to generate subsequent still life arrangements, Molinari’s models, casts, sketches and paintings reference notions of the simulacra by exploring the connection between an original subject and its representational copy, and in so doing, highlight the beauty and sentimentality implicit within both the artistic and museological motivation to preserve and memorialise.

Molinari invites us to reflect on mortality and humanity’s relationship to nature, and explores the duality of the physical and conceptual contemplation of still-life practice. Her work deals with the literal translation of duplicating the subject as an intimate reflection of the artist’s view, representing both the painted interpretation of reflective surfaces and the rumination of the taxidermic subject.

The process and understanding of taxidermy itself is vital to the developmental process of my work, not only does the act of creating the taxidermy enable me to acquire an internal and empathetic understanding of the animal, it is also just as revealing of the human sentiment to hold something away from death as well as reveal it.
Artist Statement, Michelle Molinari

As viewers we’re asked to bear witness to our own folly. In addition to the Pandemic, in recent years our world has seen some of the worst natural disasters in history, from catastrophic bushfires to sporadic though devastating flooding, both of which have resulted in death, displacement and disillusionment. These facts are perhaps best portrayed here in the works ‘Untitled’ and ‘Subject to the new state of normal.’ In the former, common street signs alert us of danger and flammable substances, depicted besides a postcard featuring a flock of black birds fleeing bushland ravaged by flames. In the latter, flood waters obscure a common road sign while in the foreground the inevitably of what continues to occur stands paramount. Both works are warnings of the dangers ahead if we don’t take action. The broader ramifications of our warming earth also take centre stage in this exhibition. The surreal and compelling ‘Global Impact,’ with its blue ‘ocean’ alarmingly melting off our world speaks of a planet in crisis. Elsewhere, in ‘The Canary,’ the vulnerability of the natural world is juxtaposed against an austere and imposing nuclear power plant, despite its scale. There is an historical through line in these works - both represent the necessity of the human spirit to understand and control our world while using it for our own gain.
Excerpt of essay by Kate McAuley, 2023

Listen: Michelle discussing her her work with Gippsland Art Gallery Curator Erin Mathews

ARTIST PROFILE:
A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, Michelle Molinari joined the FLG stable in 2013 after winning the FLG Emerging Artist Award. She has been a finalist in the Dobell Drawing Prize (2024), the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award (2019, 2018, 2016), the Fisher's Ghost Art Award (2018) and the AME Bale Travelling Scholarship (2016). In 2017 her work was curated into the Art Gallery of Ballarat group exhibition Romancing the Skull which explored themes of mortality, politics and rebellion. In the same year her work was included in Close Encounters a group exhibition at Gippsland Art Gallery. Molinari has been the recipient of the Graeme Hildebrant Foundation Travel Grant (2014) which allowed her to undertake residencies in both New York (USA) and in Florence (Italy), the Fiona Myer Award (2012) and the Majlis Encouragement Award (2012). Her work is held in the Gippsland Art Gallery Collection, The Stirling Collective and The Art Students League of New York, USA.

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Turtle Skull (after Hieronymus Bosch) 2024
oil on board
25cm x 25cm , framed
$1,200 AUD

Global Impact 2023
oil on panel
40cm x 30cm
Sold
Sold

Untitled 2023
oil on panel
20cm x 25cm
$1,400 AUD

The Canary 2023
oil on panel
50cm x 40cm
$3,000 AUD

Plastic Legacy 2023
oil on panel
40cm x 30cm
$2,200 AUD

Emissions 2023
oil on panel
40cm x 30cm
$2,200 AUD

Subject to the new state of normal 2023
oil on panel
30cm x 40cm
$2,200 AUD

Untitled (Glass Domes) 2020
charcoal & white chalk on velour paper, unframed
48cm x 70cm
$2,000 AUD

Untitled (Still Life) 2020
charcoal & white chalk on velour paper, unframed
48cm x 70cm
$2,000 AUD

Collation 2021
oil on panel, framed
61cm x 122cm framed size 76 x 137cm
$6,500 AUD

Reflected 2021
oil on panel, framed
61cm x 122cm framed size 76 x 137cm
$6,500 AUD

Cautionary 2020
oil on panel
90cm x 60cm in artist's studio
$5,000 AUD

Consequence 2022
oil on canvas
76cm x 102cm
In Artist's Studio
$5,500 AUD

Owl with Spherical Mirrors 2021
oil on panel, framed
51cm x 61cm framed size 66 x 76cm
In Artist's Studio
$4,000 AUD

Small change 2 2023
oil on panel
20cm x 25cm
$1,400 AUD

Small change 3 2023
oil on panel
40cm x 50cm
$3,000 AUD

Still Life Study 1 2021
charcoal & white chalk on velour paper, unframed
20cm x 25cm
$750 AUD