Born in St. Paul Minnesota in 1962, New York City-based artist Doug Argue’s thirty-year painting career has culminated in a striking body of abstractions that encompasses an array of mediums...
Born in St. Paul Minnesota in 1962, New York
City-based artist Doug Argue’s thirty-year painting career has culminated in a
striking body of abstractions that encompasses an array of mediums and formats.
His compositional approach extends to both spatial construction and figural
depiction in an oeuvre that lyrically conjures metaphors and art-historical
references from past to present.
His most recent body of work reveals a world
beneath the ocean’s surface, depicting a myriad of fish and coral in fluid orchestrations
of biomorphic forms and geometric shapes. His previous body of work featured
abstracted and elongated letters dissipated across illusionistic fields to form
their own lexical cosmos. Plunging down from bright colors, possibly warmer
waters, the schools of fish depicted in his new paintings share the same fate,
the unknown. Argue’s new subjects convey a tireless momentum of
regeneration. The fish act as a
reactionary field like our own collective unconscious. Poignant post initial pandemic that the group
is so tightly compacted, and yet somehow coping as a singular, vibrant living
organism.
“There
are many different histories in the world, in both art and politics, and we often see things in the current
moment, yet have no idea what lies beneath.
One language is always turning into another, one generation is always rising and another falling, there is no
still moment. I am trying to express
this flux—this constant shifting of one
thing over another, like a veil over
the moment itself.” Doug Argue
A new monograph, Letters to the Future,
edited by veteran arts journalist Claude Peck and published in partnership with
the Weisman Art Museum presents 170 reproductions from his illustrative career
in conjunction with a forthcoming exhibition at the museum.
Argue’s work has been the subject of
numerous solo exhibitions including at the Richard Heller Gallery, Santa
Monica, and in New York at Edelman Arts and Haunch of Venison. Recently, two of
his paintings were commissioned for the lobby of One World Trade Center in
Manhattan. His work is held in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of
Arts, Walker Art Center, Weisman Art Museum, and numerous corporate and private
collections. Argue has been the recipient of multiple awards including a
Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (1995) and the Rome Prize (1997).