CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Michelle Molinari

Upcoming Exhibitions

Reflect

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.

'Painter, taxidermist and installation artist Michelle Molinari treads a fine line between death and beauty in her latest exhibition Posthumous Tableaux. Through her exquisite paintings Molinari brings to life arrangements of objects that remind us of the finality of death. Inspired by the Dutch vanitas tradition of the seventeenth century, Molinari’s works seek to investigate the cultures of longing that impel the urge to preserve something from nature’s inevitable course.'
Simon Gregg, Director, Gippsland Art Gallery, 2018.

‘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

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

A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts Michelle joined the FLG stable in 2013 after winning the FLG Emerging artist Award. Most recently she has been a finalist in 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's 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.