Trey Abdella

Trey Abdella was born in 1994 in Manassas, Virginia, and now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He spent a year at West Virginia University before transferring to the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he earned a BFA in Illustration in 2016. He went on to earn an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art in 2019, where he received the Chubb Fellowship, the Leipzig Summer Residency, the Jane and Jimmy Buffett Scholarship, and the President's Scholarship. Art21, which profiled him in its New York Close Up series, has noted that he got into trouble often as a child and first turned to making art as a way of working through that experience.

Abdella's paintings and sculptural assemblages blur the line between mediums, combining acrylic, resin, and fiberglass with found objects such as wigs, fake flowers, toys, and holiday decorations, and sometimes incorporating 3D hologram fans or working mechanical parts. Art21 describes his practice as pushing painting's boundaries by embedding found objects and kinetic, interactive elements that extend the image into three-dimensional space.

His exhibition history moved quickly through international galleries: solo shows at T293 in Rome (2019 and 2021), Konig Galerie in Berlin and Seoul (2021), and a solo exhibition at the X Museum in Beijing (2022). In late 2023 he had solo presentations in New York at both Vito Schnabel Gallery, where he showed Under the Skin, and David Lewis Gallery. His work has since entered the collections of institutions including the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, the Perez Art Museum Miami, the Kistefos Museum in Norway, the X Museum in Beijing, Pond Society in Shanghai, and the Zabludowicz Collection in London. In late 2025 and into 2026 he opened solo shows with Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Berlin (Cold Front) and at the KMAC Contemporary Art Museum in Louisville (Bug Bites), and a short film about his practice premiered at the Museum of Modern Art as part of Art21's screening program.

Public critical writing on Abdella is still limited, but the institutional signals are consistent. Art21 selected him for its long-running New York Close Up documentary series and later screened a short film on his work at the Museum of Modern Art. His gallery trajectory, from T293 and Konig Galerie to a solo museum-scale presentation at Beijing's X Museum and solo New York shows at Vito Schnabel Gallery and David Lewis Gallery, tracks the kind of rapid, internationally distributed curatorial interest that museums and dealers extend to artists they consider promising. That his work has since entered public and institutional collections in Vienna, Miami, Shanghai, Beijing, and London reinforces that reading, even without a body of published critical essays to cite directly.

Abdella's auction footprint is small and concentrated. His current auction record is Sunny Days, which sold for HK$3,024,000 (roughly USD 387,700 at approximate exchange rates) at Phillips Hong Kong in 2023, though the exact sale date is not confirmed in public sources. Other results tracked by Phillips for the artist sit well below that figure, including Some Things Aren't Worth Waiting For (HK$2,646,000) and Next Door, Neighbours (HK$219,300). All of his documented top results have come through Phillips's Hong Kong saleroom, and no later auction result is recorded above Sunny Days.

Abdella is early in his career, and the market data reflects that: a small number of recorded auction sales, all at Phillips Hong Kong, and no catalogue raisonne or formal authentication program. Verification of any work should run through Vito Schnabel Gallery, his confirmed representing gallery, with Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler and David Lewis Gallery noted as galleries that have recently exhibited his work, rather than through a published archive. Given how few repeat sales exist, any single auction result should be read as a data point about that specific work and moment rather than as a stable trend line, and collectors should expect his market to remain volatile until a longer sales history accumulates.