Michael Abel (B.1990)
The Green Christ (After Denis)
Oil and oil stick on linen
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
Executed in 2024.

NOTES:

Michael Abel is a New York–based artist, co-founder of NYC architecture practice ANY, and Chief Design Officer at Frank Ocean’s jewlery line HOMER. Abel's practice navigates the unstable terrain between personal mythology, cultural inheritance, and painterly abstraction. Trained as an architect, he brings a structural intelligence to the canvas, using fragmentation and reinterpretation to probe the limits of representation. His work draws freely from memory, mistranslation, and cross-cultural slippage, constructing images that remain suspended between legibility and refusal.

His canvases operate like layered fictions, each resisting stable meaning in favor of flux, distortion, and intuitive mark-making. Through this deliberately unresolved approach, Abel crafts a visual language that sets ambiguity as the site where identity, memory, and myth coalesce.