Gallery Tour | ‘ALWAYS EVER SINCE 83’ | Woodbury House, Mayfair

Step inside ‘ALWAYS EVER SINCE 83’, a major solo exhibition by Torrick ‘TOXIC’ Ablack — one of the most historically significant yet underrecognised figures in contemporary art — presented at Woodbury House’s flagship gallery in Mayfair, London.

This is not a retrospective. It is a declaration. The title takes its cue from two words — established since — naming 1983 not as the year the art world noticed TOXIC, but as the year he convinced himself, quietly in the Bronx, that he could be an artist. That conviction is the true origin point of everything that follows. New paintings made specifically for the show sit alongside major earlier works dating all the way back to 1983, presenting over four decades of an unbroken practice as the historically significant body of work it has always been. It is TOXIC’s second solo exhibition with the gallery — and the one that finally tells his story in full.

TOXIC’s story sits at the centre of one of the most significant cultural moments of the twentieth century. In 1983 he was included in the landmark Post-Graffiti exhibition at New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery, on a roster that read as a document of the moment: Basquiat, Haring, Futura, Rammellzee, Lee Quiñones. That same year he travelled to Los Angeles with Basquiat and Rammellzee — the trip that gave rise to Basquiat’s ‘Hollywood Africans’, in which TOXIC is named not as a peripheral figure but as a subject. Across Basquiat’s entire body of work he remains among the most depicted individuals, rivalled only by Charlie Parker. Two years later, Sidney Janis returned to him directly, dedicating a three-artist exhibition to TOXIC alongside A-One and NOC.

Filmed inside the gallery, this tour offers a closer look at the works on view — the new and the historic — and the through-line that connects them: a singular artist, at the most powerful and searching point of his career, telling his own story on his own terms.

‘ALWAYS EVER SINCE 83’ is on view at Woodbury House, 29 Sackville Street, Mayfair, London, until 26 June 2026. Public viewing runs Monday to Friday, 10:00 – 17:00. Private viewings are available throughout the exhibition period. To arrange a viewing or request further information, please contact the gallery directly.