Valentina Murabito Italy, b. 1981

Valentina Murabito was born on 28 September 1981 in Giarre, Sicily, Italy, and has lived and worked in Berlin since 2009. Between 2004 and 2009 she pursued a dual course of study, attending the Accademia di Belle Arti di Catania in Italy, where she studied graphic arts including xylography, lithography, and photography, while simultaneously studying at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, Hungary. Two scholarships from the Sicily Region Award for Excellent Artists, awarded in 2008 and 2009, enabled her extended residency in Budapest, where she had round-the-clock access to a darkroom and the freedom to develop the experimental analogue methods that would define her mature practice. She graduated with honours.

Murabito's work occupies a territory between photography, sculpture, and mythology. She develops her images entirely by hand, exposing photographic emulsions onto unconventional supports including wood, steel, concrete, and wall surfaces, then manipulating the surface itself: dissolving it, moulding it, breaking it like dry earth. The resulting works are unique objects, impossible to reproduce, in which the photographic image and the physical material are inseparable. Her subjects are hybrid creatures, beings in metamorphosis from human to animal, figures whose gender and species remain deliberately unresolved. In "Bestiarium," she photographed the dwindling world of Sicilian shepherds and their animals on the slopes of Mount Etna, transforming documentary observation into something archaic and mythological. "Herbarium" extended this inquiry into the plant world. "La donna del mare," inspired by Henrik Ibsen's "The Lady from the Sea," explored the connections between mythology, nature, and the human condition through photo-sculptures developed on concrete. Across all bodies of work, Murabito refuses the capitalist premise of unquestioned human supremacy, allowing animals, plants, and humans to meet on equal terms in an encounter that feels both archaic and urgently contemporary.

Murabito's work is held in the SpallArt Collection, Salzburg, Austria, and in private and public collections internationally. Her practice has attracted sustained institutional support: grants from the Alexander Tutsek Stiftung, Munich (2020 and 2022), the Friedrich Stiftung, Hannover (2022), the Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Berlin (2021), the Stiftung für Kunst und Umwelt, Berlin (2021), VG Bild-Kunst / Stiftung Kulturwerk, Berlin (2021), and the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe (2020). In 2023 she received a grant from the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung's Trustee Programme. She was included in the Panorama programme of La Quadriennale di Roma in 2024, with a studio visit and text by critic Francesco Lucifora. She has lectured at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Catania, the University of Florence in partnership with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the German Photographic Academy (DFA), among other institutions.

Murabito's solo exhibition history spans Germany and Italy. Key presentations include I am not in Berlin (2013); Against identity (2016) and A dream within a dream (2019) in Munich; Bestiarium at Museum Gotisches Haus, Berlin (2021); a solo presentation in Erfurt (2023); and La donna del mare at 68projects by KORNFELD, Berlin (2024/2025). Group exhibitions have included MENSCHENsKINDER at the Städtische Galerie Rosenheim in cooperation with Collection SpallArt (2019), Body Language at KORNFELD Galerie Berlin (2023), and the Femina online exhibition presented by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin for International Women's Day 2024. Her work has been featured in the publication Emerging Artists Worth Investing In (Exibart Editions, 2017) and in Giorgio Bonomi's book The Solitary Body: The Self-Timer in Contemporary Photography, Vol. III (Rubbettino Editore, 2022).

KORNFELD Galerie Berlin has been a key partner in presenting Valentina Murabito's work to an international audience. The gallery's project space 68projects by KORNFELD hosted her solo exhibition "La donna del mare" from October 2024 to January 2025, a body of photo-sculptures developed on concrete that marked a significant expansion of her material practice. Murabito has also participated in group exhibitions and special events organised through the gallery, including "Body Language" (2023), the "Sogni D'Oro" event in cooperation with BVLGARI Berlin (2025), and the Winter Salon at 69 Salon by KORNFELD (2025).

Murabito's practice continues to evolve at the intersection of analogue craft, mythological imagination, and material experimentation, with each new body of work extending the boundaries of what photography, as a physical and conceptual form, can hold.