Albert Nagele
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Albert Nagele (1935-2018) was an American abstract painter who created large scale, hypnotic, dot pattern paintings with a style he self coined as “Abstract Pointillism.” Winning multiple awards while exhibiting at the Art Institute of Chicago, he had a healthy art career with multiple institutional exhibitions in the 1970s while having representation by Deson-Zaks Gallery. Nagele’s paintings imbue a static white noise that seems chaotic up close, yet orderly from a distance. Intricately painted using dots, often from a stencil similar to Lichtenstein’s comic book printing dot magnifications, Nagele folded a manufactured, pop-derived, technique into his color field abstractions.
Nagele, who resided in Wilmette, IL, was also a prolific inventor. Graduating from University of Illinois in 1962 after studying Industrial Design and Fine Art, he would go on to work for Motorola where he was instrumental in designing the original “brick” phone and the flip phone. His name is associated with these designs which are currently held in the Smithsonian and Whitney Museum of Art. He earned over 200 patents, the highest number in Motorola history.
