Dive Into The Surreal Art of Dustin Yellin

Dustin Yellin is a contemporary American artist best known for his glass veneer sculptures. Yellin’s artwork makes the hidden forces of nature legible.  

Dustin Yellin was born in 1975 in California. He is an artist who lives in Brooklyn, New York.

He is as known for his image-rich sculptures as he is for his entrepreneurship, reflected in his contemporary art hub, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn.

His sculptures—from large- to small-scale—are composed of thickly layered glass panels, painted or collaged with a riot of images that coalesce into shape-shifting narrative scenes, human figures, or isolated natural forms.

Drawing on both modernism, and the sacral tradition of Hinterglas painting, Yellin primarily works through a unique form of 3-dimensional photomontage, in which paint, and images clipped from various print media are embedded within laminated glass sheets to form grand pictographic allegories, which the artist calls “frozen cinema”.
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The 40-year-old artist courting fame with a purpose: to create a “cultural Utopia” that's part gallery, part thinktank, part school, part science lab, and part Factory-Esque party zone.

As I got older, I got more Victorian and morbid. I got into things that circled around death, like skulls or morgue photographs or handwritten diaries. They can be almost haunted with all this history, and you project onto it and then it gets onto you.
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Yellin often teases that paper itself might soon disappear, and as such, these works might become artificial fossils trapping the material much like a prehistoric fly in amber.

His work has been exhibited at many museums around the world. He holds an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the Savannah College of Art and Design.