Biography
Dana Robins (born in 1992 in Ossining, New York) is a contemporary mixed-media artist based in France. She has developed a practice focused on the influence perception, memory, and environment.
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Robins began painting in childhood and has exhibited her work internationally since 2013 in the United States, Canada, and France. Trained in applied arts, she earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Animation from Full Sail University before working in the visual effects industry on productions for DreamWorks Animation and Disney. This experience continues to influence her approach to composition, staging, and spatial depth.
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Situated between sculptural painting and post-surrealism, her work combines three-dimensional forms with dreamlike imagery to construct immersive visual environments.
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Working primarily with reclaimed wood, she carves, shapes, and assembles found materials before integrating them directly into her paintings, creating relief-based compositions in which image and volume become inseparable. Through the physical transformation of discarded materials, her work examines the traces of time, lived experience, and the ways environments shape human perception.
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Living and working in France since 2020, Dana Robins continues to develop a practice rooted in reclaimed materials, exploring themes of environmental impact, perception, and memory.
Artistic Approach
Dana Robins' paintings convey the human experience through themes of perception, memory, and our relationship to the environment.
Her works take the form of relief paintings, created from reclaimed wood, elements of furniture, panels, and discarded materials that she cuts, carves, and assembles before integrating them into the painting itself. The support thus becomes an integral part of the composition, creating works that exist at the boundary between image and volume.
Influenced by her experience in the film industry, her practice places particular emphasis on composition, spatial depth, and the staging of figures. The sculpted elements extend the pictorial space and reinforce the physical presence of forms.
Reuse plays a central role in this process. The reclaimed materials retain traces of their history, marks of use, alterations, and variations in texture. Rather than erasing them, the artist incorporates these elements into the construction of the image, transforming fragments of the past into new visual forms.
