Dina Angel-Wing
Dina Angel-Wing focuses on creating three dimensional art that appeals to different senses. Her work spans different media from the textural experience of paper and clay to the polished tactile sensibility of smooth bronze and glass.
Her sculpture aims at a visual experience that is both aesthetically, as well as intellectually engaging as some of her work has incorporated humor, puns, and symbolism. Her current work juxtaposes soft curvilinear figures with architectonic stands and smooth bronze contrasted against weathered steel, while her portrait interpretations are noted for capturing lively personality in the permanence of bronze.
Dina Angel-Wing received a B.A. in Art History from Haifa University, studied sculpture at Jerusalem’s Betzael School of Art, and upon emigrating from her native Israel, studied ceramics with Wayne Horuchi at Stanford University and Raku with Andree Thompson at UC Berkeley.
She has exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Airport Gallery, Museum of Texas Tech University, Triton Museum, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, Richmond Art Center, and the Copia Museum of Wine, Food, & Art in Napa, CA., just to name a few. In addition, her work is part of many public and private collections all over the US and Europe.
Angel-Wing has been featured in such publications as House Beautiful, Home Magazine, International Entertaining Magazine, Home and Garden, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Oakland Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and San Francisco Examiner Image Magazine.
Artist Statement
An exploration of the stylistic transformation of 20th-century art
Two decades into our 21st centennial has unraveled traditional concepts of visual art, eviscerated the very concept of physical art, and plunged it as well as all the traditional ancillary sales and promotional avenues almost to the brink of irrelevance. Virtual has supplanted physical. Real now incorporates the intangible with unprecedented abstract value in cryptic currency. Ironically, this explosion of new concepts mirrors the dramatic artistic transformations that happened exactly a hundred years ago at the inception of the modern 20th century. This era brought electrifyingly new artistic vocabulary for that time, groundbreaking techniques, and methodology, introducing cubism, expressionism, and abstract art to challenge the status quo.
Artists across all media railed against traditional values of their times to develop new and innovative artistic vocabulary, from Impressionism to Art Nouveau, from romantic Brahms to Stravinsky and Shostakovitch, from elegant carriages to functionally efficient cars. Visual arts transitioned from realism to impressionistic abstraction, washing away any sense of the literal. As a sculptor, I’m astonished at what our current social media and disruptive technology is having on the arts and wanted to experience not only what the artists at the beginning of the 20th century were discovering but what artists in our own 21st century are pursuing.
Exploring those early concepts, I interpreted two-dimensional art, like paintings, into three-dimensional clay. I often work on thematic suites based on self-imposed artistic parameters, in this case probing the impact of early 20th century art on the early 21st century artists. My sculptures in this show reflect that exploration. Other creative suites I’ve developed include sculptures of musicians, sensuous female forms, cubist style figures defined by sharp planes, and figures juxtaposed against architectonic pedestals.
Channeling the thoughts of last century artists, I tried to immerse myself into their two-dimensional paintings to re-envisioned them into three dimensional sculptures. Then I used inventions of our own new century, like virtual galleries, scanning, and 3D printing. The Homage to Picasso, for instance, started as a smaller clay maquette that was enlarged by 3D scanning and 3D printing to its present size, finally cast in classic bronze with a marble patina. This 21st century technology can capture the initial exuberance of expression in my original smaller piece but allows me to continue to work on it at a larger scale without recreating an expanded original from scratch. It also allows me the opportunity to cast a huge life size work or anything in between, depending on the collector.