“The modern artist is working and expressing an inner world,” abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock once said.
Pollack is one of those who has inspired Coral Gables artist John Angée, also an abstract expressionist whose medium is sculpture.
Angée first gained recognition when his piece Flight to Freedom was chosen for the Coral Gables Art in Public Places Program, which began in February 2010. The program has guidelines by which artwork, locations and artists are selected to enhance the City Beautiful. Called “1 Percent for the Arts,” the program, a mix of public and private effort, said that any new construction worth more than $1 million was to dedicate 1 percent of the construction cost to public art.
Angée says he enjoyed working with the city on its public art project: “I love Coral Gables, and I would be honored to have more of my pieces in the city,” he said. “I participated in a private search, and was selected by the owners of a building that was the first one to be part of the new program.
That building was the Zubi Advertising Building, known as the PonceCat Building, at Ponce de Leon Boulevard and Catalonia Avenue. Flight to Freedom was installed on an aluminum screen covering a four-story parking garage. It consists of a series of four stainless-steel pieces, each about 40 feet long, 20 feet high and 1 foot thick – and weighing about 2,000 pounds.
Flight to Freedom symbolizes the flight many have made from captivity, danger or political repression – especially meaningful to the Cuban exile community in Miami.
Angée was born in 1958 in Medellin, Colombia, where he began his art education at the School of Fine Arts. In 1983, he moved to the United States and continued his education first at Miami Dade College, where he received an associate degree in art, then at New World School of the Arts, where he earned a bachelor of fine arts in painting.
“I loved my years at the New World School of the Arts in Miami, I think that was my most important art education,” Angée said. “But the best experiences come from seeing art everywhere, all the time. Traveling, on the internet, in movies, in books – everywhere!”
In 1993, the artist visited Paris to study painting techniques at the Ecole Nationale Superieure Des Beaux, and in 2000 went to school again, to study architecture at Florida International University, where he received a master of architecture.
His latest sculpture chosen for exhibition is Passage to a Better World, installed at the Miami-Dade InterAmerican Campus as part of a multimedia project called Route to Human Rightsunder the auspices of the International Solidarity for Human Rights, a nonprofit organization.
He said the sculptures, made of steel finished with vibrant, colorful patinas, are meant as an entry to a different place, which suggests change.
“The sculptures are meant to inspire an open mind and an open heart, always conducive to changes in one’s own life,” Angée noted. “They are larger than life and meant to be touched by the spectator.
“It is this interaction between spectator and sculpture that completes the exhibit."
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