Allan D'Arcangelo

An icon of American Pop art whose work spanned five decades, Allan D'Arcangelo is known for his graphic, brightly colored paintings of highways and road signs. Flattening the perspective plane and altering traditional points of view, D'Arcangelo’s roadside compositions evoke elements of abstraction, delineation and Americana. While the artist often paints from the perspective of the “driver,” his work also takes on various patterns and shapes in undefined space. In addition to his highway works, D'Arcangelo is also known for his silhouettes, such as his 1963 painting Madonna and Child, in which the faces of Jackie and Caroline Kennedy are surrounded by halos. Iconizing the industrial American landscape and cultural mythology, D'Arcangelo’s flat color and bold perspectives made him an important pioneer of stylized, Pop-inspired painting. 

Since his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, D'Arcangelo showed his work at museums and galleries in Europe and the United States throughout the 1960's and 70's. These include Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., and the IX Bienal de Sao Paolo, Brazil. He was the recipient of a 1987-88 Guggenheim Fellowship and taught at a number of colleges and universities including School of Visual Arts and at Brooklyn College.