Prolegomeni dell'Uomo Albero

AGOSTINO ARRIVABENE

Prolegomeni dell'Uomo Albero

INAUGURAZIONE 

GIOVEDì, 12 NOVEMBRE, 2026 – H 18.00

L'ARTISTA SARà PRESENTE ALL'EVENTO!

Primo Marella Gallery Milano

Via Valtellina 31, 20159 Milano

Arrivabene’s third solo exhibition at Primo Marella Gallery presents an entirely new body of work, including a 10-metre site-specific mural.

The Project Room features more than ten installations and ready-mades from the artist’s Wunderkammer.

An accompanying catalogue includes a text by the artist and an afterword by Giovanni Gardini.

From 12 November 2026, Primo Marella Gallery presents Prolegomeni dell’uomo-albero (Prolegomena of the Tree-Man), an exhibition by Agostino Arrivabene at its Milan venue.

The artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery explores the structural analogy between human beings and trees, examining how both respond to trauma, manifested in the form of a knot. The exhibition brings together an entirely new body of work, comprising paintings, installations, ready-mades, and a site-specific mural.

Arrivabene draws on the medical tradition of associating the branching anatomical structures of the human body — the venous system, the uterus, and the cerebellum — with those of a tree. The so-called arbor vitae thus emerges not only as a scientific description, but also as a metaphor for the affinity between the human and vegetal realms.
The artist challenges the Western iconographic tradition in which the transformation of human beings into shrubs or trees entails an inexorable punishment, from the Greek myth of Cyparissus and the monstrous hybrids of Bosch to the Suicides in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Arrivabene offers a reinterpretatin of metamorphosis, shifting its meaning and implications.

His investigation focuses on the impact of trauma on both plants and the human psyche. In each, the physical response takes the form of a knot: a critical point marking the passage from before to after a destabilising event. The living being does not cease to exist, but continues to grow, albeit along a diverted course.

The exhibition unfolds across the gallery’s two main rooms and the Project Room. Conceived by the artist himself, the installation maintains a close continuity with the exhibition’s central themes and conceptual framework.
In the first room, the typically horizontal, subterranean growth of roots is translated into a site-specific installation. Freely inspired by a seventeenth-century anatomical illustration depicting the vascular system of a foetus, Arrivabene has created an outsized mural measuring over ten metres in length. It is accompanied by seven paintings drawing on the iconography of the Tree of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Two further paintings depicting reclining bodies, together with a mixed-media work originally created in 2015 and reworked specifically for this occasion, complete the room.

The Project Room features painted still lifes paying homage to Velvet Bruegel, alongside votive offerings to Hades and Persephone, the deities who preside over the artist’s personal mythology. The presentation also includes previously unseen ready-mades and archival materials from the artist’s personal Wunderkammer, exhibited to the public for the first time.

The ehibition concludes with a series of paintings in which the human body becomes enveloped in the vegetal world, as though bearing a new scar left by trauma. These works also evoke the metamorphic imagery of Arcimboldo.

An accompanying catalogue features a text by the artist and an afterword by Giovanni Gardini, Director of the Lercaro Museum in Bologna.

In Xenia, Agostino Arrivabene gives form to an imaginary botanical universe inhabited by non-existent floral species, suspended between natural recognisability and visionary invention. Although the compositions evoke the tradition of still-life painting, they elude any botanical classification: they are impossible organisms whose structures nevertheless retain a profound memory of the natural world.

Their genesis lies in a dialogue between organic matter and painting. Real flowers, dried and pressed according to the methods of botanical herbaria, are incorporated into the wooden support and subsequently covered and reworked with oil paint, until their original identities become unrecognisable. This process is accompanied by impressions taken from natural surfaces – vegetal structures, eroded wood and organic materials – transferred onto the still-wet paint and subsequently redefined through meticulous painterly intervention. The resulting forms do not directly reproduce nature, but preserve its traces, transforming them into new organic configurations. Arrivabene's botanical universe thus emerges from an observed reality, imprinted into matter, before evolving into a repertoire of forms that belong to no known species.

This research enters into dialogue with the tradition of sixteenth-century Flemish still-life painting and with the compositions of Otto Marseus van Schrieck, the seventeenth-century Dutch painter renowned for his depictions of the forest floor. Within his dark, ground-level settings, mushrooms, lichens, insects and reptiles coexist amid decaying vegetation, giving rise to an enigmatic and teeming natural world. From this tradition, Arrivabene draws the tension between beauty and dissolution, transforming it into a personal vision in which nature becomes a realm of metamorphosis and perpetual regeneration.

The title Xenia introduces a further symbolic dimension. In ancient Rome, the term referred to pictorial representations of gifts offered to guests, while its Greek origin evokes the concept of hospitality and the bond between host and visitor. The five works are conceived as offerings, votive presences gathered within an exhibition space imagined as a sacellum, a place of deposit and devotion. This ritual dimension, however, acquires a profound ambiguity: the guest evoked is Persephone, the mythological figure associated with the underworld, whose stay in the realm of the dead is not a matter of choice. The act of offering thus becomes a gesture suspended between welcome and constraint, gift and sacrifice.

Within these floral compositions, natural beauty emerges through impossible forms, while organic matter preserves the memory of what once existed. Through imaginary botany, painterly tradition and mythological evocation, Arrivabene constructs a universe in which nature is no longer merely an object of representation, but a mysterious force capable of continually generating new forms of existence.