John Phillip Abbott

John Phillip Abbott is an American painter whose work explores the interplay between text, abstraction, and personal narrative, using language as both form and meaning. His compositions—built from fragmented words, phrases, and geometric structures—reimagine text as a visual experience, often evoking memory, pop culture, and philosophical musings. Abbott’s paintings blur the line between conceptual rigor and expressive spontaneity, utilizing bold color fields, repetition, and layered gestures to create rhythm and tension within the canvas.

Abbott earned his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (2007) and studied at Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence (2006). His work has been exhibited extensively in the U.S. and Europe, with solo exhibitions at Xippas, Paris (2024, 2019-20), Baronian Xippas, Brussels (2021), Gleichapel, Paris (2019), COUNTY Gallery, Palm Beach (2018), Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn (2016), and Devening Projects, Chicago (2016). His paintings have been included in group shows at venues such as New Britain Museum of American Art, Pierogi Gallery (New York and Miami), Geoffrey Young Gallery, and Circuit 12 in Dallas, among others.

Abbott’s work has been featured in prominent art publications, including Artpress, New American Paintings, and NY Arts Magazine, and reviewed by Catherine Millet, Tristan Van Der Stegen, and Derrick Buisch. His paintings engage in a conceptual yet deeply personal dialogue, where text is both an artifact of meaning and a purely aesthetic form.

Currently based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Abbott continues to push the boundaries of text-based abstraction, creating works that bridge language, memory, and the materiality of painting.