Michelle Gagliano

Exploring Michelle Gagliano's body of work offers a profound immersion in her reverence for nature and unwavering commitment to sustainable artistry. Notably, Gagliano is an active member of the GCC (Gallery Climate Coalition), aligning her practice with a global movement towards environmentally conscious art.

Hailing from upstate New York and practicing from her studio in central Virginia, Gagliano channels a profound abstract connection to nature evident in each of her captivating pieces. She distinguishes herself by exclusively utilizing sustainable, eco-friendly materials, ensuring both artistic integrity and environmental responsibility. Light, shadow, and movement serve as foundational elements in her artistic process, with gold, a transitional metal, employed to evoke luminosity within her landscapes. From shoe polish to organic earth paints and solvents, Gagliano's use of natural materials underscores her ethos that all elements are borrowed from and returned to the earth. Eliminating toxic substances from her practice, she embraces ground pigments, oils, solvents derived from nuts and lavender, and handmade gessoes. This commitment not only enhances the atmospheric quality of her pieces but also positions her as a beacon in the realm of sustainable artistry.

To explore the recent works of Michelle Gagliano is to explore both the artist’s profound connection to nature and the commitment to her practice. Born in upstate New York, Gagliano often recalls the farm on which she was raised, and to which she credits her admiration of the natural world. Farm life provided an early understanding and appreciation of the ever-changing qualities of the landscape that have played the leading role in Gagliano’s art throughout her career. Gagliano’s formal art training is extensive, with various academic environments exposing the artist to a cadre of sophisticated teachers, peers, and practices.

She began her undergraduate education at the University of Texas Austin before transferring to University of Texas Denton to study with the famed painter and teacher Vernon Fisher. Gagliano then completed her Bachelor of Arts degree from Plymouth State University in Plymouth, New Hampshire, graduating summa cum laude with a major in painting and a minor in art history.

Almost two decades later, Gagliano once again turned to an academic setting to augment her practice and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from American University in Washington, D.C. Her resume also includes completed residencies at the prestigious Chautauqua School of Art and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. For the last ten years, Gagliano has practiced from her studio in central Virginia. Here, she remains deep in production mode.

The tangle of my surrounding landscape and its plethora of resources has always been one of my main sources of inspiration, as well as the source of the sustainable, eco-friendly materials I use. Nature provides so much to capture, examine and test. In more recent works, and in this current body of work, I have focused on the illuminating force of light in nature contrasted with the absence of light. Where there is light, there is often a shadow or darkness, and it is this dichotomy and movement that I have explored on panel. Again, I have utilized gold to convey light but this time, I have focused my attention to see how reduced and deconstructed I can reach in interpreting the landscape. Each piece is an example of the use of natural materials from shoe polish to natural earth paints and solvents, which connects the works to the concept that these materials are all part of the earth and back to the earth they will return.

Beyond her home state of Virginia, Gagliano has permeated the American art scene with solo exhibitions and curated group shows throughout Texas, Louisiana, California, and New Mexico. She has also reached an international audience through numerous exhibitions as well as gallery representation in Italy. Gagliano’s accolades are extensive, including the coveted Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship and innovative, collaborative projects with symphonic musicians and published authors. Her works continue to be curated into major private and corporate collections, both within the United States and abroad.

According to the artist, “the place I want to be most is in the studio.” Always working on several paintings at a time, Gagliano stays in the thought process, and finds herself in a constant state of inspiration. Surrounding farmland echos the farm of her childhood, with the four seasons of Virginia showcasing the transient quality of nature that drives Gagliano’s continuous experimentation and dedication to her art.

The painting of Michelle Gagliano embraces the project of the architect Alaa Negm.

On 19 April 2024, during the Fuori Salone del Mobile in Milan, the first Italian Dekton House was presented. Designed by Milan architect, Alaa Negm and featuring innovation, sustainability and the art of the Italian/American painter Michelle Gagliano, the home, environment and art harmoniously work together.

Contemporary art is increasingly integrating the concepts of sustainability and circular economy as a fundamental part of the creative process and social criticism. Specifically, Michelle Gagliano's works, created with the support of sustainable materials and colors, aim to explore new forms of expression that reflect the need for a balance between economic development and environmental conservation, thus pushing the public to reflect on their impact on the planet and encouraging more responsible practices.

Taking the concept of sustainable recipes and colors inspired by Raphael and recontextualizing the works into a contemporary context through the optics of mid-career artist Michelle Gagliano and artist curator Dr. Jo Melvin (Professor of Fine Art & Feminisms, UAL, London) is an exercise to honor what has come before and to give an entirely different context to the work. While moving through the spaces of Raphael’s native home, the duo will be exploring environmental, gender, and historical threads and how it inhabits the spaces of the collective home. From Gagliano’s home in Virginia to Raphael’s home in Urbino, transposing 500 hundred years of examining these liminal spaces, a heightened awareness of the importance of sustainable studio practices happens, particularly through the techniques and palette of Raphael. The question of what makes a safe home in an unsafe and unstable world is raised. In addition to the exhibition, “A CASA”, the duo is developing workshops and exhibitions in order to provide sustainable and safer methods that will only elevate environmental awareness.

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Artwork

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EXPLORATIONS 2023

Gagliano’s art uses strong expressive movements to capture the essential forces of nature. She

explores classical art techniques through a contemporary lens to create her singular artistic voice.

The philosophical expansion of her work embraces the act of nature and sustainability in a way that

is elastic beyond boundaries. Gagliano works vertically to incorporate gravitational forces into her

application of handmade pigments, elevating the transmission of the materials to the panel.

Renaissance recipes and unbridled experimentation in her artistic practice focus energy into the

artwork that creates an unexpected dialog with the viewer; colors embracing the earth elements

imbue her studio. Several years of creation driven by the forces of nature have led to the artist's

innate desire to be in harmony with her universe. Inspired by the arte-povera movement of the

1960s which embraced the sensibility of creating with what is available, a resourceful ethos

permeates Gagliano’s work and lends itself to a sustainable process within the studio.

SURROUNDINGS

“The power of the marginalized material of shoe polish does not go unnoticed. It is difficult to find in the grocery store. It is set aside, dusty, almost forlorn, and always on the lower shelf; yet, it possesses the power to marginalize a race, to set aside and further push down with its history and role in creating the “black face”. This material has the dual nature to transpose into the ability to mock and suppress entire communities. The shoe polish by itself is innocent but once applied, becomes guilty.  My antennae were raised and outraged. The glimmer of thought conjured by my mind: to transform the material, give it another meaning and push it away from the suppressive and subversive undertones. And ultimately, take it through Purgatory, with the end result being a cleanse of its emotional volatile discourse and a change in the view of the substance. 

The process: mix it, reduce it, dilute it, disinfect it, and replace it. The black shoepolish flows into the white shoepolish. They merge, converse, dance, and ultimately, create beauty together. Adding gold, known as a transitional metal, continues the conversation to transition away from the idea of shoe polish used by oppressive minstrels, to the idea of gold as a symbol of strength and a substance for royal burials. Elevate the shoepolish away from that paradigm and shift the use of the material. Give it a different association. Remove and repurpose the material into another art form, one not based in oppression, racism, and create an art that transcends, and transposes into an entirely new conversation without the connotations. The artist is just the choreographer within the work. The unconscious subject emerges through the dance on the surface: homages to nature, life forces, the power of the gestures that hold untapped ideas. 

This body of work is about transforming materials, changing the context and allowing collisions between physical substances and gestural ideas to co-mingle together. This gives it freedom, dignity, and strength that can transcend its humble place on the shelf. Through freedom of movement, expression and light, we move beyond the memories of the original intent. All things: sunlight and summer, winter and darkness, spring and movement, autumn and reflection; a visual exploration of crescendos, diminuendos, allegros, adagios, symphony and silences, all colluding to arrange themselves artfully into a new experience, for the viewer.”

- Michelle Gagliano

Raphael’s Pigments 

“I am perpetually fascinated by art history; bowing to all those who have come before. Currently, my obsession is Raphael and his working palette and thus, creating work based on the master’s palette. I circle around pigments that he used from ultramarine, lead tin yellow, carmine, vermillion, madder lake, verdi gris, ochres, Brazilian lake, metallic gold, metallic bismuth to more colors from the earth. Exploring Renaissance colors in a way that a musician transposes music, I am choosing to rewrite with the same few notes. A collision of the past and present, directly on the surface, my role as artist becomes director of the actors. Exploring the light reflecting quality of the pigments, they speak of the past transcending time to be re-created on surfaces that echo the Renaissance madonnas, the bright colors on the cathedral ceilings to the transposition of Mother Nature and the awareness of the environment.”

-Michelle Gagliano

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