CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Michelle Molinari

Michelle Molinari has been announced as a finalist in both the 2018 Fisher's Ghost Art Award and the 2018 Eutick Memorial Still Life Award

Michelle Molinari is a painter, printmaker and taxidermy artist. Her work thematically focuses on and encompasses notions of death, memorialisation and observation through the genre of taxidermy. By working across various media she looks to blur the divisions that typically exist between these artistic disciplines. Incorporating multiple mediums within a single installation, Molinari explores the relationships that are created between the image and object.

Drawing upon the histories of taxidermic representation and the European still life tradition, Molinari often creates her own taxidermy which generates the inspiration for her still life arrangements. Working from observation her paintings highlight a beauty and sentimentality that is implicit of the artist’s own gestural motivations for preserving and memorialising the death of these specimens.

‘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.’
Michelle Molinari 2013

A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, Molinari was awarded the Fiona Myer Award and the Majlis Encouragement Award in 2012. She exhibited in Flinders Lane Gallery’s annual emerging artistprogram Exploration 13, and was announced joint winner of the FLG Emerging Artists Encouragement Award. Molinari held a highly anticipated and successful first solo exhibition with Flinders Lane Gallery in 2014, and in the same year was announced as a finalist in the Eutick Still Life Award. In December 2014 she was announced the winner of the Graeme Hildebrant Foundation Travel Grant, which allowed her to undertake residencies in both New York (USA) and in Florence (Italy) . In 2015 her major work Nature Mort was acquired for the Gippsland Art Gallery Collection. In 2016 Molinari was a finalist in both the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award and the AME Bale $50,000 Travelling Scholarship. Most recently Molinari was curated into the Art Gallery of Ballarat's group exhibition Romancing the Skull in 2017, an exhibition which explored themes of mortality, politics and rebellion and was a Finalist in the 2018 Fisher's Ghost Art Award.