Michele Abeles

Michele Abeles is an American visual artist. Abeles graduated with a B.A. in Psychology from Washington University in St Louis. She has an M.F.A. in photography from Yale University. Abeles’s use of photography maintains an anonymous approach, prying open gaps in a seamless visual episteme. Her characteristic treatment of the body alternates between deploying it as a readymade and peering at it as a greyed-out form knowable only as it is abstracted, dispersed, projected onto, exposed, or dressed up. Abeles explores concepts of finitude and escape, inverts military technology, and surveys the body as a vessel of style, a site of acquisition and display, a walking code and clock.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

'Zebra', 47 Canal, New York (2016); 'Baby Carriage on Bike or Riot Shield as Carriage', Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); 'Find Out What Happens When People Start Getting Real', Sadie Coles HQ, London (2014); 'English for Secretaries', 47 Canal Street, New York (2013); 'Αγγλικά για Γραμματείς', Andreas Melas & Helena Papadopoulos, Athens (2013).

Selected Group Exhibitions

'DIDING – An Interior That Remains an Exterior?', Kunstlerhaus, Graz, Austria (2015); Second Chances, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado, USA (2015); 'A World of its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio', MoMA, New York (2014); 'Test Pattern', Whitney Museum of Art, New York (2013); 'Empire State', curated by Norman Rosenthal and Alex Gartenfeld, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy (2013); 'Speculations on Anonymous Materials', Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (2013); 'New Photography 2012', Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); 'Greater New York 2010', MOMA PS1, Long Island City (NY) (2010).

Further Reading

Michele Abeles, Michele Graw, Michele Abeles: ZEBRA (London / New York: Sadie Coles HQ / 47 Canal, 2016).

Michele Abeles, Sara Cwynar, Jon Rafman and Travess Smalley, ‘Recoding Images: A Round-Table Interview Curated by Lauren Cornell’, Mousse, no. 43, Milan, March 2014, pp. 238-253.

Sara Knelman, ‘Michele Abeles’, frieze, issue 167, London, November – December 2014, pp.174-175.

Sean Ashton, ‘Michele Abeles: Find Out What Happens When People Start Getting Real’ ArtReview, London, December 2014, p. 110.

Roberta Smith, ‘Art in Review: Michele Abeles: English for Secretaries’, The New York Times, New York, 17 May 2013, p. C24.

David Velasco, ‘Michele Abeles’, Artforum, New York, November 2011, pp. 258–261.