“Dario Ghibaudo’s work invites us to enter the estranging normality of the real, to deepen that condition and look at it more and more with open eyes. It is useless to fantasize, to shut oneself up dozing inside one’s own fantasy world: it is reality itself that acquires a sense of estrangement as we open wide our marveling gaze on the world…” – Achille Bonito Oliva

Since 1990, Dario Ghibaudo has developed his central lifelong project, the Museo di Storia Innaturale (Museum of Unnatural History), conceived in the spirit of the seventeenth-century natural history museum. At first glance, the project takes the form of a playful scientific institution, populated by specimens, archives, classifications, and imaginary forms of research. Behind this apparently ironic structure lies a broader investigation into the ways human beings observe, classify, define, and attempt to make sense of the world around them. The museum is organized into halls devoted to different fields of “unnatural” scientific investigation, including Anthropology, Entomology, Rare Specimens, Botany, Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, and Anamorphosis. More recently, it has expanded to include Marvellous Creatures, produced in materials such as porcelain, white clay, concrete, and marble powder. Rather than constituting a conventional collection, these rooms create an alternative system of knowledge in which scientific language is transformed through imagination, irony, and fiction.The use of Limoges porcelain, white clay, concrete, and marble powder contributes to the physical and symbolic identity of the beings represented. Particularly significant is porcelain, whose fragility introduces a sense of vulnerability into the apparent solidity of the museum specimen. The creatures can consequently be read as endangered beings requiring protection and care, making their fragility a metaphor for the vulnerability of existence and, more specifically, for the precarious position of everything perceived as different.

This tension between scientific order and imaginative invention is fundamental to Ghibaudo’s practice. His works initially appear to imitate the language of scientific cataloguing: specimens are isolated, identified, collected, and displayed. Yet the objects gradually reveal themselves as strange hybrids, improbable forms, or possible results of a genetic experiment gone wrong. What appears familiar becomes uncertain, occupying an ambiguous space between reality and fiction, nature and invention. This ambiguity is particularly evident in Ghibaudo’s investigation of animal mutation, which began in the early 1990s and developed into a series of large-scale sculptures resembling a contemporary medieval bestiary. Drawing on ideas of evolution, transformation, and metamorphosis, these creatures combine scientific observation with the fantastical and uncanny. In some works, recycled plastic further complicates the relationship between the natural and the artificial, transforming an ordinary industrial material into the body of an extraordinary living being.

The notion of the specimen also extends into the human and artistic realm through the Archive of Artists’ Noses, a virtual archive that Ghibaudo has maintained since 1994. The collection comprises approximately seventy cast specimens, including the noses of Andrés Serrano, Orlan, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Enrico Baj, Piero Gilardi, and Stefano Arienti. Fifteen noses were exhibited for the first and only time in Germany in 1998. Each cast is mounted on paper and preserved in an individual cardboard box. For Ghibaudo, every nose is a clue, inviting the viewer to mentally reconstruct the imaginary face to which it belongs. An anatomical fragment thus becomes simultaneously a specimen, an archive, and a sign of identity.

This logic of collecting and categorising recalls the historical practice of displaying exotic animals, plants, objects, and human “curiosities.” Through museums, cabinets of curiosities, colonial collections, and scientific exhibitions, unfamiliar beings and objects have been removed from their original contexts, named, classified, and transformed into objects of study. Ghibaudo appropriates this mechanism while questioning the categories through which reality is organised. What is considered normal or abnormal is not fixed, but shaped by cultural, historical, social, and geographical circumstances.

His anomalous creatures can therefore be understood as metaphors for human difference. Their exoticism, strangeness, and uniqueness reflect the characteristics that distinguish each individual, while also evoking the exclusion and discrimination that difference can produce. What initially appears to be a defect or deviation from a norm can instead become a source of identity and strength.

The imagined “other” ultimately becomes a mirror, questioning the distinction between “us” and “them”, the familiar and the foreign, the normal and the abnormal. Ghibaudo ultimately transforms the imaginary museum into a space where the desire to understand encounters the complexity, fragility, and diversity of existence.

ARTWORKS HIGHLIGHTS

INSTALLATION VIEWS

Exhibition Title: Hypnagogic Atla
Artists: Dario Ghibaudo, David Hochbaum
Location: Luisa Catucci Gallery, Allerstr. 38,  12049 Berlin
Curator: Luisa Catucci
Nov 22nd – Jan 20th, 2020

SELECTED EXHIBTIONS

His recent solo exhibitions include Mutazioni, Palazzo del Capitano – Sala delle Pietre, Todi, Italy (2026); Mutazioni, Espace Constantin Chariot, Brussels, Belgium (2025); Museo di Storia Innaturale, Museo Organica – CEDAP, Tempio Pausania, Italy (2023); Museo di Storia Innaturale, Complesso Monumentale di San Francesco, Cuneo, Italy (2022); Creature Meravigliose – Museo di Storia Innaturale, Sala XVIII, Galleria Pack, Milan, Italy (2018); Creature Meravigliose, Galleria De Ambrogi @ Cluster Art Gallery, Rome, Italy (2018); Magno Subsidio, Visionarea Art Space, Rome, Italy (2018); Sculture da viaggio, Casa Romana, Spoleto, Italy (2017); Sculture da viaggio, Galleria Rossana Orlandi, Milan, Italy (2016); Museo di Storia Innaturale, Palazzo Tagliaferro, Andora, Italy (2015); Musée d’Histoire In-Naturelle, Château d’Oiron, Oiron, France (2015); Sculture da viaggio, Paolo Tonin Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy (2014); I peccati capitali sono otto – Museo di Storia Innaturale, Sala XV, Galleria Zabert, Turin, Italy (2011); Cinquecentocinquanta pesci fuor d’acqua, Palazzo della Rosa Prati, Parma, Italy (2010); Museo di Storia Innaturale, Sala XIII – Pesci e Anfibi: Cinquecentocinquanta pesci fuor d’acqua, Paolo Tonin Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy (2008); Museo di Storia Innaturale, Sala X – Etnografia: Calpestabile, Paolo Tonin Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy (2005); Museo di Storia Innaturale, Sala XII – Etnologia: Siamo Dei, Paolo Tonin Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy (2004); Museo di Storia Innaturale, Sala XI – I Diorami, Galerie Angelo Falzone, Mannheim, Germany (2000).

His recent group exhibitions include Territoires sauvages. Une traversée intérieure, Château de Jau, France, with Galerie DYS, Brussels (2026); Cani in posa, Reggia di Venaria Reale, Turin, Italy, curated by Francesco Petrucci (2019); Ríos Intermitentes, Bienal de La Habana, Havana, Cuba, curated by María Magdalena Campos-Pons (2019); Wunderkammers, Museo Poldi Pezzoli & Gallerie d’Italia, Milan, Italy, curated by Martina Mazzotta and Lavinia Galli (2013); 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, special event, Moscow, Russia (2013); Le Nouvelles Folies Françaises, Musée d’Archéologie Nationale, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, curated by Patrick Amine (2013); Venti per Una – America Latina. Venti regioni per una Italia. Venti artisti per una mostra, Centro Cultural Borges, Buenos Aires, Argentina, curated by Martina Corgnati (2013); Miroir, Galleria Luisa Delle Piane, Milan, Italy (2013); Tuffo, Complesso architettonico Torre di Mola, Formia, Italy, curated by ARIA (2013); 50+1 Sculture in città tra memoria 1962 e presente 2012, Palazzo Comunale, Cappella di San Ponziano, Spoleto, Italy, curated by Gianluca Marziani (2012); Remote Sensing, Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan, Armenia, curated by Martina Corgnati (2012); Arte Accessibile, Spazio Eventiquattro – Gruppo Il Sole 24 Ore, Milan, Italy, curated by Silvia Fabbri (2012); Venti per Uno, Castiglia, Saluzzo, Italy, curated by Martina Corgnati (2012); Il dolore di altri animali, Fondazione Maimeri, Milan, Italy, curated by Elisabetta Longari (2012); Vernissage, Deutsche Bank, Turin, Italy, curated by Palazzo Leonardo Arte e Cultura (2011); VAF Percorsi riscoperti, MART, Rovereto, Italy, curated by Gabriella Belli and Daniela Ferrari (2011); Ustioni, Bologna, Italy, curated by Matteo Bergamini (2011); La scultura italiana nel XXI secolo, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan, Italy, curated by Marco Meneguzzo (2010); Paralleli, II Biennale d’Arte, Palazzo Ducale, Sabbioneta, Italy (2010); L’anima dell’acqua – Cinquecentocinquanta pesci fuor d’acqua, 53rd Venice Biennale, Ca’ d’Oro – Galleria Franchetti, Venice, Italy, curated by Silvia Fabbri (2009); Tute blu e colletti bianchi, Fondazione Torre Colombera, Gorla Maggiore, Italy (2009); Irreversible, Fondazione Casa Delfino, Cuneo, Italy, in collaboration with Artaria, curated by Enrico Sanna (2009); Liberi Libri, Galleria Weber, Turin, Italy (2009); Cento e più ceramiche per il paradiso, Fondazione Stelline, Milan, Italy, curated by Sergio Calatroni (2008); La nuova figurazione italiana – to be continued, Fabbrica Borroni, Bollate, Italy, curated by Chiara Canali (2007); Anni Settanta – il decennio lungo del secolo breve, Palazzo della Triennale, Milan, Italy, curated by Francesca Alfano Miglietti (2007); ManifesTo, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Turin, Italy, curated by Riccardo Passoni (2006); Nature and Metamorphosis, Urban Planning Exhibition Center, Shanghai and Beijing, China, curated by Marisa Vescovo (2006); ManifesTO, Turin, Italy, curated by Gallerie d’Arte Moderna & Contemporanea (2005); PlotArt Europa, Genazzano, Italy, curated by Gianluca Marziani (2005); Open 2005 – International Exhibition of Sculpture, Venice Lido, Italy, curated by Paolo De Grandis (2005); Miracolo a Milano, Loggia dei Mercanti & Palazzo della Ragione, Milan, Italy, curated by Alessandro Riva (2005); Un’estate italiana – Figurative Kunst aus Italien, Die Galerie, Frankfurt, Germany, curated by Klaus Wolbert (2005); Ipermercati dell’Arte, Complesso Museale di Santa Maria alla Scala, Palazzo delle Papesse, Magazzini del Sale, Siena, Italy, curated by Omar Calabrese (2004); Quotidiane Meraviglie, Magazzini del Cotone, Genoa, Italy, curated by Alessandro Mendini (2004); Figurative Kunst aus Italien, Frankfurt, Germany, curated by Klaus Wolbert (2004); XII Biennale di Arte Sacra, San Gabriele, Italy, curated by Marisa Vescovo (2004); Mind the Gap, Museo PAV, Berchidda, Italy, curated by Giannella De Muro and Antonello Fresu (2004); Tendenze attuali dell’arte italiana, MART – Palazzo delle Albere, Trento, Italy, curated by Marco Meneguzzo (2003); Aktuelle Positionen italienischer Kunst, Mathildenhöhe Institute, Darmstadt, Germany, curated by Fondazione VAF (2003); Sumptuous, Cantieri Culturali Ex Macelli, Prato, Italy, curated by Palazzo delle Papesse Centro Arte Contemporanea (2002); Tutto l’odio del mondo, Palazzo dell’Arengario, Milan, Italy, curated by Alessandro Riva (2002); Una Babele postmoderna, Palazzo Pigorini, Parma, Italy, curated by Edoardo Di Mauro (2002); Dalla Mini al mini, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy, curated by Gianluca Marziani (2001); M.A.U. Museo di Arte Urbana, Galleria Campidoglio, Turin, Italy, curated by Edoardo Di Mauro (2001); Sui generis, PAC – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy, curated by Alessandro Riva (2000); Welchome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy, curated by Gianluca Marziani (2000); Ironic, Flash Art Museum, Trevi, Italy, curated by Michele Robecchi and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio (2000).

INQUIRY