Trey Abdella at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin

Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler is pleased to present Cold Front, the first solo exhibition by Trey Abdella with the gallery.

Growing up in West Virginia, Abdella’s earliest experiences of visual spectacle came from theme parks, hunting trips, and the seasonal displays of domestic life. In his practice, he reflects on how everyday craft, decoration, and entertainment shape the way we see and feel. Trained as a painter but working with a cinematic and sculptural approach to surface and texture, he constructs complex, tactile compositions. Abdella carries forward this fascination with illusion and craft, drawing inspiration from Robert Gober’s exploration of the uncanny in the everyday and Tex Avery’s exaggerated animation logic.

Within Cold Front Abdella examines how ceremony, tradition, and commercialization intersect within the visual language of winter, often leaving the viewer suspended between tenderness and unease, affect conveyed through panoramic views and spatially immersive scenes. In Thin Ice (2025), a pair of skaters glide across a frozen pond, while beneath them a submerged figure drifts lifelessly under resin that glistens like ice, as romance collapses into horror. Outdoor Cat (2025) shows a couple framed by domestic warmth, gazing at a cat freezing beyond the frosted glass. The scene is animated by a hologram fan, its spectral image glimmering beside artificial pine and animatronic rabbits. Elsewhere, details turn uncanny: the wide, silent scream in the child’s eye in A Little Birdie Told Me (2025); the young boy gripping a knife in Run, Run As Fast As You Can (2025); the broken ceramic angels half-buried in Snow Angels (2025).

Abdella’s works are built on the accumulation of materials, references, and emotional charge. His components are scavenged as much as selected, sourced through eBay listings, junk stores, or suburban leftovers. For Abdella, these objects carry traces of sentiment and absurdity, humor and discomfort synonymous to the emotional afterimage of American domestic life. Layers of resin and pigment mingle with lenticular prints, glittering fragments, and broken ceramic. His hybrid process destabilizes painting as a category, pushing it toward sculpture, assemblage, and motion. In When Hell Freezes Over (2025), logs of sculpted foam, a house, LED lights, motors, and metallic tinsel that simulate the flicker of fire.

Extending his ongoing exploration of American visual culture, Abdella transforms the aesthetics of celebration into meditations on longing, loss, and imitation. The artist reveals how rituals of joy, family, and festivity depend on acts of concealment and how spectacle in consumer culture smooth over what is tender, anxious, or strange, leaving emotion itself caught beneath the surface sheen.

TREY ABDELLA (b. 1994) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work reckons with the horror and melancholy of the American dream. Blurring the lines between painting, sculpture, and assemblage, he utilizes a number of techniques to create hyperrealist, mixed-media works. Abdella works with acrylic, resin, fiberglass, 3D hologram fans, and other materials and incorporates a variety of found objects such as wigs, fake flowers, toys and Christmas decorations, playing on the illusionistic depth in his scenes. Abdella received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and his MFA at the New York Academy of Art.

TREY ABDELLA was featured in the Art21 short film Trey Abdella’s Miserable Dream which premiered at MoMA in October 2025 as part of Art21 at the Movies.

Solo exhibitions by the artist include: KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville (2025, upcoming); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2025); Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York (2023); David Lewis Gallery, New York (2023); X Museum, Beijing (2022); KÖNIG GALERIE, Seoul (2021); T293 Gallery, Rome (2021); KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin (2021); T293 Gallery, Rome (2019).