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extends to both spatial construction and figural depiction in an oeuvre that lyrically conjures metaphors and art-historical references from past to present.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).