Douglas Abdell

An intensely driven and prolific artist, Douglas Abdell’s work spans painting, drawing, tapestries and sculpture, permeated with the same obsessive interest in language and animated by the phonetic games with which he ‘emancipates’ and (re)imagines written alphabets – between the archaeological and the fictional. Abdell comments:

My sustenance as an artist is the complicated balance between the euphoria of the unknown and that which is known and their imminent application when conceiving a sculpture.

Abdell came to prominence in the New York art scene of the late 1970s, during the heady period which also saw the emergence of street art, block-parties and the hip-hop scene. He became a hot name in the New York city art galleries of the 1970-80s (Crispo, Graham, Gallozi-La Placa…) working from post-minimalism and “Aekyadic” sculptures to graffiti inspired paintings, totems and collages of urban cultures.

From the 1990s, Abdell chose to relocate from New York City and largely turned his back on the fame which he had enjoyed (exhibiting alongside artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Louise Nevelson) to the relative obscurity of Malaga, Spain to explore his Mediterranean-Lebanese roots. He then began an outstanding series of sculptures entitled “M = AGUA”; creating a Phoenician archaeological fantasy-in-stone, reincarnating Hannibal the Carthaginian commander who fought the Romans (3^rd century BC). These Mediterranean works made of wood, marble and Sepulveda stone, were exhibited on several occasions in Sicily, acclaimed/curated by the prominent Italian art critic, Achille Bonito Oliva.  

“M=AGUA” opens a new dialectic of materials: between wood and stone, organic and mineral, earth and water. “M=AGUA” references water and the Phoenician invention of the letter ‘M’ – inspired by the waves of the Mediterranean Sea - but also the tragic upturned rafts of the contemporary migration crisis.

“M=AGUA” is part of Abdell’s emblematic cycle of “Fourth Punic War” offering a very long-view of the geopolitics behind the Lebanon-Palestine-Israel crisis and the ongoing Middle East disasters – seen through the mixed up and interconnected Etruscan and Phoenician symbols and hieroglyphs populating his works.

As the artist makes a statement for the whole series:

M = AGUA. The Phoenicians looked at the waves of the Mediterranean Sea from where they developed the letter M. Hence M = Water. My relation with the world is evolving, moving on accordingly with my Mediterranean genes. The West depends more than ever on what is happening in the Eastern Mediterranean. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The metaphor for this posture and observation is Water.

Douglas Abdell (USA, 1947) Lives and works in Málaga, Spain. Born in Boston, MA to an Italian mother and Lebanese father, Douglas Abdell is a sculptor who also produces paintings, drawings, engravings, and tapestries dominated by writing and graphic signs. His work explores the deep bond between words, images, sound, and form in intimate and political subjectivity. The artist believes that this link has been particularly close and significant in the ancient languages, now extinct, once spoken in his family’s countries of origin: Phoenician and Etruscan.

Abdell’s work has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is held in collections including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. H. H. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Switzerland. Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Brooklyn Museum, New York City, New York. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, Rose Art Museum, Massachusetts. Stanford University, Stanford California and Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris, France.

This entry was written by Morad Montazami, Director of Zamân Books & Curator.