Artist Bio

Michel Abboud is an artist and an architect based in New York, founder of SOMA and represented by Opera Gallery worldwide.

Having earned a Masters in Advanced Architectural Design from the University of Columbia in New York in 2004, Michel Abboud immediately kicked off his career by founding the award-winning architectural practice SOMA in New York. His designs have attracted critical acclaim for their boundary-pushing nature. Abboud has won the World Architecture Award in 2019, the James Beard award in 2015, and is a two-time winner of the Architizer A+ award, in 2016 and 2017, to name a few.

Having built a reputation for provocative projects, Michel’s defiant no compromise stance, in terms of design, has gained him respect among a loyal client base and fellow design professionals. His work is rising around the world today with remarkable offerings of projects that underscore his firm’s cutting edge appeal. In 2010, his design for Park 51 in New York further catapulted him into prominence, with one journalist dubbing him ‘the most controversial architect the US has known.’ The project was ultimately shelved in favor of 45 Park Place, a 665-foot condominium tower also designed by Abboud, making him one of the youngest architects to have achieved the design and execution of a skyscraper in New York.

Such notoriety has led to a subsequent influx of invites as Speaker at prestigious institutions across the world, where Abboud has often described his work as a conscious combination of critical thinking and user-friendly functionality, encased within a systematic problem solving approach that seeks out-of-the-box solutions in order to keep pushing the envelope. The groundbreaking designs for the recently completed and record setting uber-luxury building “One at Palm” in Dubai, with a whopping million square feet of built-up area, and one of a kind features, hold testament to Abboud’s methodology and to SOMA’s achievements.

In recent years he has shifted his career from architecture to art, a shift that began by his combining art and architecture through the creation of large-scale parametric sculptures in various urban and rural landscapes around the world. These parametric sculptures are the result of 15 years of research in form making. Through the use of advanced digital tools and scripting software, Abboud is able to generate complex forms that are not traditionally “modelled” or “sculpted”, but “evolved” from a single repeated module, a three-dimensional cubic pixel – the manifestation of the digital in the physical world.

His debut solo show at the Hoerle-Guggenheim Gallery in New York in 2018 entitled “Unfolded” covered his first series of paintings which are heavily influenced by his childhood in a war-torn environment. He uses high viscosity acrylic paint with no brushes and no knives- just his hands, while using the entire body as a tool to cover the large format canvases laid on the ground. His art exudes emotions that can only make one reflect on the nature of conflict, whether inner or circumstantial. The dual conflicting nature of those questions is at the essence of his art process. He often describes his paintings as “non-paintings” because each art piece is not intended to represent anything other than itself.

His latest solo show at Opera Gallery showcases several series of Abboud’s works. It starts out with his very first Gemini Series 4x4 feet diptych paintings, which then evolved into to the large format 5x6 footers Impressions series whereby a “mother” painting” gives birth to “child” paintings, one born from the other. The exhibition then leads to his sculptural wall pieces of folded canvas on canvas that came as a result of years of experimentation with the materiality of form and content.

After investigating the possibilities of manipulating the actual paint matter in a sculptural and material process, Michel Abboud proceeded to explore the physical support itself: the canvas. So many artists over time have manipulated the canvas in different ways. Some have left it blank, others painted in white or in various colors, some burned it, some stabbed it, and others tore it. Abboud has chosen to fold it. By stripping it from its frame, then slicing it, in order to finally fold it onto itself, He seeks to blur the distinctions between content and container, support and object, medium and product. The folded canvas freed from its frame can now take on a multitude of new forms and materiality. Each piece is unique and can never be replicated as each fold is unique – like a fingerprint – due to the complexity of the form. By taking on a variety of light sensitive colors, ranging from metallic hues to shades of darks, down to pure white, investigating the way form and color dynamically react to light depending on the temperature of light and the position of the viewer. Each piece uses traditional materials: regular paint on basic canvas, applied with a standard brush. Yet by applying the amazingly simple process of the fold, what started out as a classic application of paint on canvas now becomes a remarkably complex array of forms that refract light in a multitude of ways, unconstrained by the two dimensional space of the flat canvas. The resulting piece blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture, and opens a dialogue about the distinction between the two: is it a painting or a sculpture? In the end, it is an object in space, with a certain materiality, and a dynamic reactivity to light, intended to only be appreciated for what it is, as opposed to what it is not. 

Last but not least, at the core of Michel Abboud’s work, are his parametric sculptures, which blur the boundaries between art and architecture. A “parametric” sculpture is a physical manifestation of the digital, in a technological world where the digital has replaced the spiritual. The omnipresence and omnipotence of digital space is sustained by the unequivocal presence of technology in every aspect of our daily lives. Our religious dedication to technology and the digital world has caused digital imagery to become the icons of our new system of belief.

The pixel - the smallest unit of a digital image - is a digital atom that sculptures like Totem or Digital Versicolor represents three-dimensionally in the form of the agglomeration of hundreds of pristine cubes. The same way pixels aggregate to create an image, these three-dimensional pixels of various materials and colors are manipulated parametrically to create a physical object that represents the embodiment of the digital world.
The centrality of Totem will reminisce indigenous ceremonies by very the act of gathering around an icon of belief. It will represent the central role technology has had in connecting us all. The structural impossibility that Digital Versicolor or Pixel Tree defy challenge the common notions of balance and equilibrium. But ultimately, the real paradox relies in the very fact that despite advanced digital scripting software generating the complex relationships between the 3D pixels, each sculpture is built by hand, in an artisanal way.