In her 30-year career, Dina Wind left behind a strong collection of works with a distinct style and point of view. Her practice was rooted in abstract expressionism, and Wind referred to her sculptures as “drawings in space”.
Wind initially focused on painting, eventually redirecting her work towards sculpture, and in 1978 she started welding her first sculptures at the Cheltenham Art Center in Philadelphia. Among the scrap yards and heaps of industrial cast-offs, Dina Wind found her visual vocabulary for artmaking. She became adept at welding and layering compositions of found steel, incorporating and repurposing anything from old car parts to saw blades, conscious that her choice of material was also an environmental statement. These works sometimes alluded to, but never directly imitated, representational forms. Some compositions that Wind developed with the intention of mounting to walls she dubbed “brooches” and thought of as large-scaled pieces of jewelry for architecture.