Michael-René Prince’s work moves between revelation and concealment, belonging and estrangement. Rooted in the charged terrain of identity, migration, and memory, his practice spans large-scale abstract portraiture, painting, and mixed-media works. His sweeping forms and bold colors draw from the layered histories of Panamá—its lush vitality and political volatility—as well as the restless energy of New York City, where he immigrated as a child.

Prince’s surfaces hold the push and pull of personal and collective narratives: the fragmentation of displacement, the persistence of cultural inheritance, and the quiet negotiations of living between worlds. Figures emerge and dissolve in his compositions, occupying spaces that are neither fully seen nor fully obscured. This ambiguity becomes a threshold—an invitation to look deeper, not for answers, but for resonance.

His process is physical, intuitive, and iterative, often built from gestures that both disrupt and repair. In the layering of pigment and the reworking of form, there is a rhythm of construction and erasure, echoing the ongoing act of self-definition in uncertain times. Political unrest—both in the Panamá of his childhood and the America of his adulthood—casts a shadow over his work, not as a direct depiction of conflict, but as an undercurrent shaping its emotional architecture.

Born in Panamá and raised in the cultural crucible of New York City, Prince inhabits the perspective of someone shaped by diaspora, translation, and adaptation. His visual language bridges the emotional intensity of abstract expressionism with the immediacy of pop sensibilities, crafting portraits that are as much about presence as they are about the histories and silences that surround it. What emerges is a body of work that speaks to survival and transformation—where the personal becomes a mirror for broader human complexity.