“I didn't have television, I didn’t have a radio, I didn't have a telephone,” he says. He has continued making them until today.
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© Provided by The Nationalĭouglas Abdell began making a series of works he calls 'Aekyids' while in Thoreau-like seclusion in the 1970s. He developed his own internal vocabulary to typify his paintings, drawings and sculptures, which he uses as liberally as if it were accepted terminology, for example, he refers to his hieroglyphic-like works, letterings that he scratched on carbon paper during his first period of seclusion, when he lived "like a hermit" in the New York and Vermont woods for six years, as his "Aekyads". Language, and in particular its shape on the page, is a constant throughout his work. His work has now been rediscovered by French curator Morad Montazami, who has put together a small retrospective of the pieces at Ab-Anbar Gallery in Cromwell Place, London.ĭivided into three sections, Reconstructed Trap House, on view until Sunday, October 24, provides a semi-chronological overview of Abdell’s concerns: his black-and-white, hieroglyphic-like work that he started making in the 1970s and continues today the energetic paintings he made in New York in the 1980s – which Montazami terms Neo-Expressionist – and lastly, the somber, totemic sculptures he has made over the past 20 years, inspired by the Phoenicians.Ībdell grew up in the north-eastern US speaking Italian with his mother’s family, Arabic with his father’s Lebanese family, and now Spanish with his wife. He moved to Spain, first to Madrid and then to Malaga, and worked in relative obscurity for 30 years.
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I worked for three, four years, and made over 400 works.” © Provided by The Nationalĭouglas Abdell's work from the 1970s collaged together movie posters from Chinatown in downtown New York City. It was so exciting, to see everything mix together. As we well know, the art world is upper-class, snobby, closed people – and all of a sudden you see these people from the street. The graffiti artists were getting into the art world. “There were all these concerts – rap and hip-hop and Grandmaster Flash.
“It was the great period of New York, like Paris with Picasso,” he says. The son of a Lebanese and Italian family, Abdell made his name in downtown New York in the late 1970s, incorporating kung-fu movie posters and graffiti into his collaged paintings hanging around with Jean-Michel Basquiat even installing monumental sculptures on Park Avenue in the dead of night. "I represent the East,” says artist Douglas Abdell, 74, fashioning an “E” symbol with three fingers of his right hand.
An installation view of Douglas Abdell's retrospective at Ab-Anbar Gallery, showing on the wall collaged paintings made in New York in the 1970s, and his later columns from the 1980s that responded to the Lebanese Civil War.