Fine Art
Murals are a medium, not a boundary. Michael Che Romero is a classically trained fine artist whose practice spans the wall and the canvas. Every mural, sculpture, and installation begins in the same place as his paintings, in the studio, with an idea worth giving form.
Commissions
Michael's work has been commissioned by cities, developers, hospitality brands, and private clients across the country. Beyond murals, he creates original paintings on canvas he builds himself, for homes, offices, lobbies, and collections, each conceived for the space and the people it belongs to.
Disrupting the Gallery
In 2012, on Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles, we staged Disrupting the Gallery, a pop-up billed as the world's first street art tapestry show. It took Michael's paintings and tapestries out of the white cube and hung them on the walls of the city. Not as murals, but as fine art, meeting people where they live. It was an early statement of what Vivache would become.
The Cultural Incubator
In 2017, Michael showed alongside ten other artists in the Cultural Incubator, a gallery series we curated inside Eat Sleep Train Repeat in the Los Angeles Arts District, where each artist took a wall.
The unseen collection
In the years since, between commissions, Michael has kept painting for himself. That work has grown into a private body of paintings that has never been shown publicly, the most personal expression of his practice. We are preparing to share it.
A portrait of Dr. Indu Bhusan Mishra
After the passing of Seema’s father, Michael painted this portrait in his honor. Dr. Mishra was the chemist whose work on airbag propellants has saved countless lives, and whose guidance shaped the additive in every Vivache mural. To those who knew him, he lived as a saint, and Michael painted him as one, haloed in gold against an open sky. Cherished by his family, it is one of the most meaningful works Michael has created.
