Douglas Abdell

Critical text

Douglas Abdell (b. 1947, Boston) is a prolific American-Italian-Lebanese artist who has worked on painting, drawing, sculpture, assemblage, and tapestries since 1968. The core of Abdell’s practice is research on the origin and evolution of language from ancient Phoenicia in the Mediterranean to the rise of the graffiti in New York. Each of his series is driven by phonetic games with which he reimagines written alphabets. In the late 1970s Abdell worked in New York in a rich lively cultural landscape interwoven with street art, graffiti, hip-hop, and the return of figuration and expressionism in a post-conceptual era. This complexity is apparent throughout Abdell’s career, in particular in his Aekyad outdoor welded steel sculptures of the early 1970s, and then in his paintings and assemblages of the early 1980s. From 1981 to 1984 the artist used salvaged junk materials, including posters, newspapers, packaging, and wooden crates. The resulting assemblages, collages, and totem-sculptures constitute a melting-pot of languages and visual references, from the early Mesopotamian signs to New York street culture. Abdell developed this practice of merging high art and street culture in parallel to Rammellzee, Basquiat or Kenny Sharf’s experiments, to which he adds a layer of historical references that links the contemporary to ancient Mediterranean.

Text by Balthazar Lovay