“Formed by growing up in a multicultural suburban Australian environment during the 1980s and 1990s, my work uses gesture and erasure to register memory, place, and lived experience.“
Michael Angel is an American–Australian artist based in New York. Born and raised in Melbourne, Australia.
Angel is self-taught and began painting at an early age. Between 1997 and 2000, he lived and worked in London before relocating to New York City in 2001, where he has lived and maintained a studio practice for over two decades. His work spans painting, works on paper, and mixed media, and is characterized by a balance between gestural abstraction and figuration. Through processes of accumulation, erosion, and removal, his work reflects an intuitive engagement with time, environment, and emotional residue rather than fixed narratives.
Before focusing exclusively on fine art, Angel built an influential career in fashion and textile design, pioneering early uses of digital print in New York. From 2007 to 2014, he ran his own namesake label, integrating original artwork into textile production. This period established a foundational relationship between material, surface, and repetition that continues to inform his painting practice.
Since turning fully to painting, Angel’s work has evolved through sustained studio-based inquiry rather than discrete series. While informed by artists such as Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Gerhard Richter, and Mark Rothko, his practice resists stylistic categorization. Instead, it has developed a distinct visual language—one that consolidates gesture, erasure, and material intuition into a coherent vocabulary shaped by lived experience and long-term practice rather than style.
Angel maintains an active studio practice in Brooklyn, New York, where he lives and works.