Doug Argue (b. 1962, Minnesota, United States) has exhibited widely, including his notable One World Trade Center commission in New York City. His works are held in the collections of major public, private, and corporate collections including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center, and the Weisman Art Museum. Argue has received multiple awards including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (1995) and the Rome Prize (1997). The non-profit Save Venice Inc. presented Scattered Rhymes, an exhibition of four monumental paintings by Argue that was a collateral exhibition in the 2015 Venice Biennale.
Doug Argue’s paintings are made with layers of radiant brushwork and scrims of crisp stencilled letters that envelop the canvas to suggest the passage of time, light, motion, and how the past informs the present. His technique combines precision and painterly gesture. His paintings are cerebral with interweaving narratives and layers of meaning. Argue's work investigates the flux of life, suggesting the passage of time, and how the past informs the present.
The atomized letters, “particulate matter” as Argue calls them, are culled from various texts including writers such as Petrarch, Melville and Rimbaud. They work harmoniously with other visual elements to create the possibility for unlimited patterns and meaning. Argue’s use of letters are not meant to be read, rather they serve a spatial or rhythmic function, like visual musical notes, floating, stretching and dancing en masse across the plane. Argue’s work is rooted in ideas and allegories; compositions unbind recognizable images and literature to offer a new charged visual language.