Abed Abdi is a Palestinian sculptor and muralist. He was born in 1942 in Haifa where he still lives. He belongs to the generation of post-1948 pioneering visual artists.

His father Abed el Rahman el Haj, was mayor of the city of Haifa in the years 1920-1927. In April 1948, the family´s artist were uprooted from their home, his father remained in Haifa. They went to live in different refugee camps until they were allowed to go back to Palestine as part of the family reunification program.

He start his love for art during high school where he learned painting and sculpting. In 1962 he was accepted for membership in the Haifa branch of the Israeli Association of Painters and Sculptors becoming the first Palestinian member.

He studied Fine Arts in Germany where he specialized in murals and environmental sculpture.

In 1970 after he received his diploma, he was selected along a group of other graduating students at the academy, to participate in the erection of a huge mural at the Cultural Palace built in 1968 in Dresden. The mural still remains a cultural landmark of this part of unified Germany.

In 1972 Abdi returned from Germany and started working as an illustrator, graphic designer, sculptor, curator and teacher of fine art in colleges and community centers.

After studying in Dresden, Abdi became the first Palestinian to build monumental art on native soil. His allegorical monuments in Galilee, honouring human fortitude and resistance, include a narrative mural. He built a bronze monument dedicated to six Palestinians who were shot on Land Day (1).

In the years 1972 to 1982 he was the graphic designer and graphic editor of the newspaper Al Ittihad and of the literary journal Al Jadid published in Haifa. During this period working there, he created caricatures and illustratios.

In the 1990s he started to change things in his art and he began turning to mixed media and color painting, using materials like glass, copper, wood and aluminium.

The city of Haifa awarded Abed Abdi the “Herman Struck Best Artist of the Year” in 1973 and that year he obtained the Young Artist´s award at the Berlin International Youth Festival.

Abed Abdi has exhibited in Qatar, Israel, Belgium and Bulgaria. He has participated in over 45 group exhibitions, among them the joint Palestinian-Israeli exhibition “It’s possible” which toured the US and Germany between 1988 and 1990.

In 1995 he participated in the second exhibition for Palestinians and Israelis in Germany. His work appeared in the “Solidarity with the Palestinian People” exhibit in Tokyo, Berlin, Brussels, Belgrade and Athens.

He also organized and participated in exhibitions around Palestine in the period between 1980 and 1987 defending the freedom of expression and creativity.

In 1999 for the second time he received the Hermann Struck Best Artist of the Year Prize.

During the years 2001, 2002 he received a number of awards from local Rotary clubs in Haifa and Nazareth.

In 2008 he became the first Palestinian artist living in the illegal state of Israel to win the Israeli Minister of Science, Culture and Sport Award for art and graphic art. In the same year he received a honorary mention from Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue Between Cultures.

In 2010 he received the title of notable citizen of Haifa.

Part of an interview with Abed Abdi, Palestinian painter from Haifa, Feb 2014

Reference

(1) On 30 March 1976, thousands of people belonging to the Palestinian minority in Israel gathered to protest Israeli government plans to expropriate 60,000 dunams of Arab-owned land in the Galilee. In the resulting confrontations with Israeli police, six Palestinians were killed, hundreds wounded, and hundreds jailed. In the intervening years, those events have become consecrated in the Palestinian memory as Land Day.

Abed Abdi ´s work

Memorial at Shafar’

                                                     Memorial for the six martyrs of the Day of the Land (1978)

…in Wadi Nisnas for the Feast of the Feasts, in 1998

Majnoune

Sources:

–Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation

-Institute for Middle East Understand (http://imeu.org/article/who-are-some-well-known-palestinian-painters-or-other-visual-artists)

-ElectronicIntifada.com

-Jadadiyya.com

-Abedabdi.com

Further Reading:

–Part of an interview with Abed Abdi, Palestinian painter from …

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzmQNokv-Yo )

– What is it that Palestinians commemorate on Land Day?(http://electronicintifada.net/content/what-it-palestinians-commemorate-land-day/5039 )

– Abed Abdi and the Liberation Art of Palestine

(http://abedabdi.com/index.php/en/reviews/203-abed-abdi-and-the-liberation-art-of-palestine )