Michelle E. Bien
The Artist
The Artist
Michelle Bien is a multidisciplinary artist and designer living and working in Michigan. After earning her Bachelor of Fine Arts with High Honors from the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan in 2007, she established her professional foundation through preliminary work in the arts, nonprofits, administration, gallery management, sales, marketing, web design, and research.
She is currently working in the fields of fine art and design with projects that include interior architectural design, product design, business management, and writing. More recently, her art has been featured at ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, two art exhibitions in Traverse City and Leland in northern Michigan, and at three live plein-air painting events in Leelanau County and Traverse City.
Michelle Bien’s work has been exhibited throughout Michigan and has received national recognition.
The Art
The art of Michelle Bien reveals poetic and often metaphorical interpretations balanced by literal representations as a way to activate the deeper levels of consciousness where holistic, epiphanic, and transcendental metamorphoses is generated.
Elaborating upon the awareness that the (theoretically universal) subconscious plays a mysterious but important role in perception and experience, universal themes – such as nature, archetypes, consciousness, and geometry – are chosen as subject matter. The form is refined to reveal its core essence. Subjects are stylized in a thoughtful balance between reality and abstraction, between their actual and their potential.
The resulting compositions generate a tranquil study that contemplatively investigates consciousness and meaning, while commenting on the state of humanity’s most relevant and enduring questions that are often replete with duality and opposition, augmenting the dynamic between audience and author and encouraging newly advanced dialogue.
Ms. Bien’s works are as varied as her media: Paintings often appear as dreamlike images in which ambiguities between fiction and reality shift meaning and, as a consequence, the audience’s experience. Her graphic designs and illustrations offer a similar surreal signature while still remaining true to their inherent purpose.
Her textile arts and other consumer-driven products are never entirely about the product’s literal function: Here, again, unique aspects added to everyday visual and tactile languages, intending to bridge meaningful connections between art, design, and technology, giving rise to new interpretations, perceptions, and possibilities.