Michelle Molinari

Artist Profile

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

‘In her dedicated studies, she alternates between reproducing the spacious compositional elements, the inked line work and the expert colour rendering of Ukiyo-e and Kachō-e, in and among her own painterly techniques. She deconstructs and painstakingly reassembles, testing and extending her own technical proficiency. The resultant body of work, richly coloured and finely detailed, is chimeric. Vibrant gradients, intersecting planes, caricatured figures and deep cut calligraphic line work meet hyper-realist, still-life oil rendering. Somewhat uncannily, Hokusai’s chickens lie among van Aeist’s; and the floating world, rich with stories and symbolism, permeates the depths of the Vanitas. Molinari’s paintings fold art histories, geographies and eras into truly exquisite corpses.’
Excerpt from catalogue essay by Carolyn Leach-Paholskii 2025

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Artist CV

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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