Isabella Devinast

Isabella Devinast

SCULPTURE

INTRODUCTION

Steel caught my heart when I was sixteen.

While at boarding school, I went to the blacksmith class and ever since, steel and fire haven’t let me out of their hot and strong hands.

Steel is very vivid to me. It has character and warmth.

If you ever had the possibility to see how steel is milled, have seen how a blast furnace plant works, this vast impression will never leave your heart again. It is an act of pure creation, extremely impressive, sheer energy.

As I am a woman in a male dominated field, the feminine aspect of my material, our epoch and history is eminent and omnipresent in my work.

STEEL I specialise in walk-in sculptures in steel for entrance halls and gardens/outdoors, partly amplified through colour and leaf gilding.

These works provide experiences that make life more intense.

My walk-in sculptures foster the development of new thoughts as they change your perception of proximities. You are able to let yourself glide into new horizons whilst buzzing in energies you create through your own mind.

Thus they are perfect places to arrange meetings, brainstormings, gatherings, think tanks or just dinner parties in an extraordinary setting.

They merge simplicity, pureness and strength and appear light and fragile at the same time.

OTHER WORKS IN STEEL

BRONZE Working with bronze begins at the modelling of wax model, a meditative and deeply satisfying process which I enjoy to the full.

To later see the polished, shiny sculpture, often combined with woods -ebony, cedar- fills me with a tender, blissed feeling that the buyer or commissioner can see radiating in every piece.

Isabella Devinast

D

evinasts’ sculptures are on the one hand touchingly beautiful, on the other hand painfully attractive. Again and again, the artist leaves us orphaned with a mix of conflicting feelings and thoughts. In a search for new methods to ‘read the city’, she focuses on the idea of ‘public space’ and more specifically on spaces where anyone can do anything at any given moment: the non-private space, the non-privately owned space, space that is economically uninteresting. At times, disconcerting beauty emerges. The inherent visual seductiveness, along with the conciseness of the exhibitions, further complicates the reception of their manifold layers of meaning. By emphasising aesthetics, time and memory always play a key role.

B

y applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, her works references post-colonial theory as well as the avantgarde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system. Her works further are often about contact with architecture and basic living elements. Energy (heat, light, water), space and landscape are examined in less obvious ways and sometimes developed in absurd ways.

D

evinasts’ works as well demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century, seamlessly sliding into the twenty-first.

It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves.

AnnaIsabella and LisaDevinast currently lives and works in Berlin.

isabella@devinast.com.

http://www.devinast.com