RUBEN MONTINI – ORIZZONTE D'AMORE

Curated by Oscarito Sanchez
Galleria Gaburro – Verona
25.05 – 10.10.2026

Opening
23 May 2026
from 6:00 PM

Galleria Gaburro is pleased to present ORIZZONTE D'AMORE, the first solo exhibition realised together with the gallery by Ruben Montini (Oristano, 1986; lives and works in Turin), curated by Oscarito Sanchez and hosted in the gallery’s historic venue in Verona at Via dei Mutilati 7/a.

The exhibition, preceded by the performance DAI MIEI SENI PIANGE L'AMORE (2026), held at the gallery’s Milan venue, brings together a new body of work which, starting from the performance itself, continues the artist’s political and testimonial urgency to generate reflection and debate around same-sex families. Family—a recurring theme that symbolically permeates both the exhibition and Montini’s practice—takes shape through heterogeneous forms and perspectives, retracing the last years of his poetic and artistic research.

In the words of Oscarito Sanchez:

“Montini’s work is not a theatrical representation but a symbolic device: a living portrait of migration, understood as territorial and gender displacement, as the fracture of social bonds, and as a persistent search for belonging in contexts of exclusion. […] During the journey, the horrors and monsters of the past—social, cultural, historical—emerge and attempt to prevent him from exercising a fundamental desire: the right to form a family.”

Within the exhibition space, the artist’s new production reconstructs an archetypal and essential domestic environment, transforming the gallery into the stage of a necessary and ongoing revolution in which Montini’s visual language fully emerges. It becomes a kind of new visual anthology—though not a chronological one—in which each work refers back to the artist’s broader practice while simultaneously moving beyond it to investigate new and fundamental perspectives: from the recurring weight of religion, reflected in spiritual and Christological iconography, to physical suffering, whether inflicted by others or self-inflicted.

It is the artist’s performative body that comes into play: a body for which life and art coincide, transforming itself according to the very demands of art.

“Montini’s performative body functions as a critical device in which archive and testimony overlap and continually redefine one another. A space of gender migration and affective displacement, it operates as a living archive capable of collecting and returning traces of experiences marked by dynamics of exclusion in contemporary society.”

— Oscarito Sanchez

ORIZZONTE D'AMORE traces precisely this dangerous and risky trajectory: a path that leads the artist to expose himself to the harshness and cruelty of a world in which identity exists in constant tension, vulnerable and perpetually exposed to martyrdom.

The exhibition will be enriched by a public program consisting of talks, meetings, and debates, culminating—on the occasion of the finissage—in a new performance, the result of several years of research and study, to be presented at the Palazzo dei Mutilati in Verona on Friday, 9 October 2026.

A monograph dedicated to the artist’s practice, edited by Oscarito Sanchez and published by Maretti Manfredi Editore, will also be released.

Opening Hours
Monday–Friday
9:00 AM–1:00 PM, 3:00 PM–7:00 PM

Free entrance

Saturday by appointment

The central work from which the entire exhibition unfolds is last March’s performance, presented here through what remains of it: the sculptural installation, videos documenting the succession of performative moments, the demonstration staged with the participation of the audience, the piercing of the artist’s ribs and nipples, the insertion of pearls recalling drops of milk flowing from the breasts, and the socio-political statement proclaimed by Montini at the end of the act.

Alongside these elements is a series of sculptural-photographic works that the artist calls Stories: interventions made directly on photographs by Andrea Rossetti documenting the action, resulting in unique works where photography, sculpture, painting, and social protest intertwine.

The Synopsis is framed within an object reminiscent of an ex-voto, in which the original piercings and cannulas worn by the artist during the performance support the same pearls on a reproduction of his torso made of Sardinian brocade and black lace.

DAI MIEI SENI PIANGE L'AMORE is not theatre. It is a raw portrait of what we prefer not to see or confront, yet which continues to exist before our eyes.

The performance is structured in acts but deliberately stripped of conventional theatrical logic. It is not a stage representation but a symbolic device: a living portrait of migration, understood as territorial and gender displacement, the rupture of social bonds, and the persistent search for belonging within contexts of exclusion.

The work embodies the figure of the migrant artist as a subject suspended in a permanent state of transition.

Throughout this journey, the horrors and monsters of the past—social, cultural, historical—emerge and attempt to prevent him from exercising a fundamental desire: the right to form a family. The performance challenges a deeply rooted assumption: the denial that a man can simultaneously be mother and father, caregiver and origin.

The performer’s gaze is not offered as a site of tears but as a reflective surface. Within it, the viewer recognizes themselves and, through this identification, attempts to evade what is most difficult to confront. The work proposes an identity that is neither binary nor fixed: men, women, or—as in the ancestral Zapotec culture—the Muxes. A third possibility—or multiple possibilities—in which every gender contributes indispensable fragments to existence.

In the second act, the body appears suspended. From above, two pearls emerge from the chest; from below, two drops of milk are about to fall. The image overturns biological and social imaginaries of care and nourishment, questioning who has the right to nourish, protect, and sustain another life.

The third act recalls childhood memory. Time pauses in anticipation: waiting for the drop to fall, waiting for something lost to nourish us once again. The work then formulates an essential question: is there a right to be the one who nourishes another, and through this act, to find a family?

The performance insists upon an ethical and political triad: where do love, death, and solidarity stand? If tomorrow is already today, how much have we truly changed?

Montini affirms his existence without pleading or prayer. His hands do not merely know how to sew; his eyes do not merely know how to see, but how to observe. The notion of family is redefined: no longer exclusively a blood bond, but a possible community between artist, viewer, and the desired child.

As a prologue to this major reworking of the performative act, the exhibition opens with the monumental work Lullaby, Sweet Dreams (2026), in which Montini expresses his desire to fall asleep in the arms of another man—his husband—and their child. This is among the first works by an Italian artist to portray a same-sex family. The sculptural installation raises urgent questions within contemporary debates about different family structures, parental aspirations, and the legal discrimination that still affects them.

In the gallery’s outdoor space, we find ourselves in the courtyard of a home, where Montini continues the staging of a domestic environment initiated in the first room. Here, a daily gesture—hanging laundry out to dry in the sun—takes center stage.

Letter to a Child I Will Never Have (2026), echoing the title of Oriana Fallaci’s legendary book Letter to a Child Never Born (1975), reaffirms the same desire for parenthood that the artist had already explored in his memorable performance MOTHER, presented in 2019 at the South Bohemian Gallery after having been censored in 2016 when it was scheduled to take place at the University of Verona.

The photographic documentation of LUPA (2016), a performance realized by Montini in Palermo, concludes the exhibition, closing a ten-year cycle in which the artist has explored his desire for motherhood through various media and approaches. Beginning from personal experiences, the work addresses collective concerns and gives voice to the Italian LGBTQIA+ community and the challenges it is currently facing.

Ruben Montini

Ruben Montini (Oristano, 1986) lives and works in Turin.

Considered one of the leading figures of Queer art in Italy, he was included in 2019 by Anton Anthonissen and Evert van Straaten in the landmark publication QUEER!? Visual Arts in Europe 1969–2019, recognizing him among the artists shaping the evolution of European queer art.

More recently, Elisabetta Roncati included him in the volume Arte Queer as one of the few Italian voices capable of deeply investigating “what it means to be queer and how society perceives it.”

Montini’s research focuses primarily on performance—drawing upon the feminist traditions of the 1960s and 1970s—and textile practice, a discipline he teaches as Visiting Lecturer at the Royal School of Needlework in London.

Today, the artist intertwines these two languages, creating physical actions that interact with soft sculptures and installations produced together with his studio assistant, the young artist Mattia Ozzy B., or in direct collaboration with the public during collective performances.

The materials used in his textile sculptures reflect the layering of his identity: Sardinian brocade as a constant reference to his roots; his personal clothing, charged with autobiographical memory; and African and Arab textiles purchased in Turin’s Barriera di Milano district, a historic crossroads of migration and the location of his studio.

Through his own body—displayed, incised, wounded, and glorified—Montini alternates vulnerability and political gesture, transforming individual pain into shared memory and exposing the wounds inflicted by the social body.

Embroidery plays a fundamental role in his poetics, understood in the sense articulated by Rozsika Parker in The Subversive Stitch (1989) and later revisited by Joseph McBrinn in Queering the Subversive Stitch (2019): removed from its domestic associations, embroidery becomes a powerful language of resistance.

As Lorenzo Bernini has observed, Montini’s work “is political because it is intimate”: the artist’s body becomes map, memory, and archive.

His works have been presented at major international institutions, including the MAN Museum of Art of the Province of Nuoro, the Museum Europäischer Kulturen, Museum Arnhem, and the Museo Bagatti Valsecchi.

Oscarito Sanchez

Oscarito Sanchez is a curator and filmmaker with a degree in Cinema and Visual Communication. He lives and works between Austria and Mexico.

He directed the documentaries Historias de Concreto, Sinaloa Cowboys, and Cercatori di Paradiso, and has collaborated with internationally renowned artists and filmmakers including Teresa Margolles, Francis Alÿs, Marina Abramović, Regina José Galindo, and Carlos Amorales.

With more than ten years of experience in contemporary art across Austria and Latin America, his curatorial research focuses on fostering intercultural exchange and collaboration between Latin American and European artists, creating platforms for dialogue and artistic mobility.