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extends to both spatial construction and figural depiction in an oeuvre that lyrically conjures metaphors and art-historical references from past to present.

In his series of works using letters of the alphabet, fluid orchestrations of biomorphic forms and geometric shapes, amidst spontaneous gestural swaths of color are swept over different pictorial depths and surfaces suggesting movement, instability, and the passage of time. Integral to Argue’s vocabulary of shapes, computer-generated stencils of scattered letters dissipate across these illusionistic fields to form their own lexical cosmos.

Culled from literary classics such as Moby Dick to sonnets by thirteenth century poet Petrarch, Argue’s atomized texts are inspired by psycholinguistic and scientific phenomena. The artist explores abstraction syntactically: paragraphs, sentences, and words compose and decompose into one another, until they are only discrete letters; stretched and skewed, elastic and malleable as meaning itself.

“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).