In charming Frenchtown, NJ, 20-year-old artist Michael Angelo Mangino has reinvented abstraction. Mangino’s highly consistent style of painting was created outside art historical references; it is self-developed and completely non-representational.

Mangino’s paintings come to life at Studio Route 29, an art studio and local creative hub for individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities. He began attending Studio Route 29 in 2022 through Fierce, his high school’s community instruction program, and immediately connected with the satisfying materials available at the studio. Mangino has quickly developed into a sophisticated artist and abstract painter, and making art has become a key means of expression and sharing for him as he is primarily non-speaking.

The fluency and invention in Mangino’s private, non-objective language are both rare and profound. They highlight the power of art and art-making to bring transcendent meaning to those open to its call and that art can open doors that could have easily been left shut without a slight helping hand in finding the innate creative potential within. Mangino’s story is amplified by the sheer confidence and power evoked in his paintings, which possess a competency and level of distinction that belies his years and experience.

Michael Angelo Mangino (b. 2004) is based in Pittstown, NJ. The title of his debut exhibition at Shrine is an appropriation of text from one of his many works on paper that integrate vertical lists of words drawn from his beloved word search puzzle books drawn on top of his signature abstract imagery.