Michael Angel is an American-Australian artist born in Melbourne, Australia, who moved to New York City in 2001. A self-taught painter who began at the age of five, Angel draws on influences from impressionism, cubism, and abstract expressionism. His work centers on the human form and its environment, reassembling and distorting subjects to create layered, evocative narratives.
He began his career in fashion design and forged an innovative path as a textile designer by pioneering digital print techniques. From 2007 to 2014, he ran his own namesake label in New York, focusing exclusively on digital prints created from his original art. Later, he incorporated this expansive digital body of work into his paintings.
Shifting his focus entirely to painting, Angel launched Series 1 in East Hampton, NY. Influenced by artists such as Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, his work uniquely blends gestural abstraction with figuration. His 2018 exhibition, "Home," marked a significant step into figuration, exploring domesticity through a series of eight portraits inspired by photographs from his youth. While the expressive palette knife techniques of his earlier abstractions remain, they now serve to obscure and distort the figures, unsettling the comforting narratives of home life. The screen-like grid-a nod to his background in digital textile design-adds a layered quality that reveals the deep emotions experienced by both subject and artist.