American
b. 1962, Saint Paul, Minnesota
Lives and works in New York, New York

Doug Argue’s oil paintings express a sense of the infinite by fusing elements of the visual arts, science, and language, often in mural-sized works. He explores the tradition of painting while employing contemporary concepts of realism, abstraction, and expressionism. Earlier figurative and representational works have included highly detailed and often monumentally scaled depictions of leaves, cock’s combs, books and other subjects that, at times, edge towards the conceptual. Throughout his career, Argue has combined highly disciplined control and investigation of material with expansive and dynamic compositions that reflect his fascination with our ongoing evolution in the fields of art, language, and culture.

In his most recent work, Argue creates fluid orchestrations of biomorphic forms and geometric shapes, amidst spontaneous gestural swaths of color that are swept over different pictorial depths and surfaces. They suggest movement, instability, and the passage of time. Also integral to Argue’s current vocabulary of shapes are computer-generated stencils of scattered letters that dissipate across his illusionistic fields to form their own lexical cosmos. Two large paintings, each over 13 feet long, are installed in the lobby of the new One World Trade Center in New York.

Doug Argue’s work is found in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center, Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, and numerous corporate and important private collections. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Richard Heller Gallery, San Francisco; Edelman Arts, New York, Haunch of Venison, New York; and Associated American Artists, New York; among others. He was recipient of the Rome Prize (1997) and of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (1995) among other awards.