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.

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.

Isabella Devinast

Anna and Lisa

B y applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, her

works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-

garde 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. Isabella Devinast currently lives and works in Berlin.

isabella@devinast.com.

http://www.devinast.com