Michael Rey

Michael Rey (born in Sarasota, Florida 1979) is an American abstract painter. Rey lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Education.
Rey received his BFA in 2002 from Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota, Florida, and his MFA in 2008 from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA.
Work.
Rey is an American contemporary abstract painter. Rey’s wall-based artworks exist at the juncture between painting and sculpture, combining three-dimensional forms with painted surfaces. The works are built from oil plasticine using an experimental technique that produces a delicate, skin-like exterior. The holes in these otherwise seamless objects function as measures of space, reinforcing a sense of objectness by punctuating and piercing the artworks’ surfaces. Rey’s pieces exhibit a non-hierarchical relationship between color, shape, and surface in a manner similar to the minimalist art of Donald Judd and John McLaughlin. The wall works are born from Rey’s dreams and doodles; they begin as foreign shapes that evolve into signifiers of broader cultural contexts. Rey addresses the human tendency to seek meaning in everything, and calls attention to the mutability of images in a technological age. When choosing the titles of his works, Rey types nonsensical word jumbles into the Google Search Console to find combinations of letters which do not already exist.