ALLAN D'ARCANGELO

Allan D’Arcangelo (b. 1930, Buffalo, New York; d. 1998, Manhattan, New York) is well-known for his paintings of landscapes deeply embedded in the American experience. His work from the early 1960s references American highway culture and the semiotics of road signage; later using vernacular imagery to render desolate urban industrial landscapes. His painting is in part a reaction against the mysticism of Abstract Expressionism, but also recalls the representational abstraction of the American Precisionists in the 1920s, such as Ralston Crawford and Charles Sheeler, who were using European Cubist and Futurist tropes to explore industrial America. D’Arcangelo is retrospectively associated with Pop art through his use of contemporary imagery, flatness of image, and conceptual approach to picture-making, however D’Arcangelo’s work is more serious and politically engaged. He was concerned with exploring the notion of the image, and constructed visual illusions that specifically critiqued the changes happening within contemporary American society. His early highway paintings refer to the road as a symbol of man’s intervention in the natural world, our increasing separation from it and ultimately ‘from ourselves’.