Trey Abdella introduces Cold Front at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Berlin, a presentation that tracks his ongoing interest in American material culture and the uneasy pull of seasonal imagery. The exhibition runs from November 15, 2025 through February 18, 2026 and marks his first solo project with the gallery. Abdella grounds the presentation in memories shaped in West Virginia, where theme parks, hunting trips, and holiday décor formed his earliest visual cues. He channels those impressions into a practice that uses surface and sculptural detail to create scenes that feel familiar yet disorienting.
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The exhibition builds its tension through winter iconography, where ceremony, tradition, and commercialization converge. Abdella uses these codes to structure scenes filled with emotional charge. Thin Ice (2025) introduces two skaters gliding on a frozen pond while a figure lies beneath the resin surface, introducing a shift from romance to horror. Outdoor Cat (2025) sets a couple behind a windowpane while a cat freezes outside, its image intensified by a hologram fan, artificial pine, and animatronic rabbits. Abdella continues this thread in A Little Birdie Told Me (2025), where a child’s eye carries a wide, silent scream, and in Run, Run As Fast As You Can (2025), where a boy grips a knife. Snow Angels (2025) shows broken ceramic angels embedded in snow, adding another unsettling note.
Abdella constructs each piece through a dense accumulation of objects and procedures. He gathers much of his material from eBay listings, junk stores, and suburban discards, creating an inventory shaped by sentiment and absurdity. He pairs these finds with resin, pigment, lenticular surfaces, glitter fragments, and shattered ceramics. His approach dismantles the limits of painting by forcing it toward sculpture and assemblage. When Hell Freezes Over (2025) incorporates sculpted foam logs, a house, LED lights, motors, and metallic tinsel that create the effect of fire within a frozen scenario. The sensory charge of these materials reinforces the emotional contradictions that structure the exhibition.
Cold Front extends Abdella’s research into American rituals, with a focus on how joy and festivity often sit beside imitation, longing, and loss. He engages with Robert Gober’s examinations of everyday uncanny detail and Tex Avery’s hyperbolic cartoon logic, using these references to heighten the slippery territory between humor and discomfort. Abdella treats consumer culture as a field shaped by concealment, where bright surfaces carry emotional residue beneath the sheen.
Born in 1994, Abdella lives and works in Brooklyn, where he continues to shape his mixed-media vocabulary. He works with acrylic, resin, fiberglass, hologram fans, and a wide range of found items, including wigs, fake flowers, toys, and Christmas decorations. He creates hyperrealist scenes charged with texture and sculptural density. Abdella earned his BFA at the School of Visual Arts and his MFA at the New York Academy of Art. His work reached wider audiences through Trey Abdella’s Miserable Dream, an Art21 short film that premiered at MoMA in October 2025 during Art21 at the Movies.
Abdella’s solo exhibitions include KMAC Contemporary Art Museum in Louisville (2025), Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Berlin (2025), Vito Schnabel Gallery in New York (2023), David Lewis Gallery in New York (2023), X Museum in Beijing (2022), KÖNIG GALERIE in Seoul (2021), T293 Gallery in Rome (2021) and 2019, and KÖNIG GALERIE in Berlin (2021). His works appear in the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Kistefos Museum in Jevnaker, ICA Miami, Perez Art Museum Miami, Pond Society in Shanghai, X Museum in Beijing, and the Zabludowicz Collection in London.
