“The works are voyeuristic but ultimately become incredibly intimate. Through my process, I begin with impressions, controlled moments that give perspective with a specific point of view. I then either scrape away or leave a minimal presence of the subject and its environment, this is the beginning of the conversation.”
Michael Angel is an American-Australian artist. He was born in Melbourne, Australia, and moved to New York City, United States in 2001.
Michael Angel is a self-taught artist, who started painting at the age of 5. Influenced by movements such as impressionism, cubism, and expressionism- Angel focuses his eye on the human form and surrounding environments, re-assembling and distorting his subjects and figures in the process.
Angel began his career in Fashion design forging an innovative path as a textile designer with his use of digital print at the early days of the medium, shortly after he launched and ran his own namesake label in New York in the years 2007- 2014, which focused solely on digital print using his own original art. Angel would later incorporate this expansive body of digital artwork by using these textiles in his
artwork.
Angel then turned his focus solely on painting to begin Series 1 in East Hampton, NY. Influenced by artists such as Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Gerhard Richter and Mark Rothko. Angel’s influences can be seen through his unique blend of gestural abstraction and figuration.
Angel’s show titled ‘Home’ in January 2018, would be his first major step into figuration. The exhibition explored the subject of domesticity through a series of eight new paintings, portraits that were primarily inspired from photographs dating back to his youth. Although far from the total abstraction of some of his earlier works, the canvas scraping of his palette knife technique is still present and serves here to obscure and distort in order to distance the figures and unsettle a narrative of comforting home life. The screen-like grid that recalls his earlier work at the forefront of digital textile design, it is the figures themselves that have a distinct layered impression that gives the viewer a clearer understanding of what he has felt during the process, being able to express the emotion of both subject and artist.
Angel currently lives and works in Los Angeles.