Earlier this month, we sat down with Torrick ‘TOXIC’ Ablack in his studio in Brittany, France, for a thirty-minute conversation ahead of his return to Woodbury House, Mayfair.

You can watch it here: A Conversation with TOXIC | Ahead of ‘ALWAYS EVER SINCE 83’

TOXIC’s studio is on the north-west coast of Brittany. Quiet. Coastal. A long way, in every sense, from the trains and walls of the South Bronx where TOXIC’s practice began.

That distance is the point. Forty years on from the year that defined everything since, TOXIC works here — without the noise, without the market, without the constant pressure to perform a version of his own history for an audience that wasn’t there. Just the work. Day after day. Spray cans, linen, paper, paint. The same instinct that has carried the practice from 1983 to now.

Joseph Bannan, Partner at Woodbury House, travelled to the studio to sit with TOXIC ahead of the exhibition. The conversation that follows is what came out of that visit.

This is not a rehearsed artist statement. It is thirty minutes of TOXIC speaking directly — about the people, the moments, and the ideas that shaped a practice now in its fifth decade, and about the exhibition that brings him back to Mayfair this month.

He speaks about Jean-Michel Basquiat. He speaks about Rammellzee. He speaks about A-One. He speaks about Ikonoklast Panzerism — the intellectual framework that taught him letters were not passive symbols, but active forces. He speaks about the losses. The displacements. The years when the world moved on and the work continued anyway.

He also speaks about the show itself. What ‘ALWAYS EVER SINCE 83’ means. Why this title, and why now. How the new work differs from what came before. What the symbols he keeps returning to actually mean — and what people have been taught they mean. Two entirely different things, as he is the first to point out.

And running through all of it: 1983.

That year sits at the centre of everything. It is the year of the Sidney Janis Gallery group exhibition — the moment a generation of artists who had built their practice on the streets and subways of New York were placed inside one of America’s most venerated institutions. Basquiat, Haring, Futura, Rammellzee, Lee Quiñones. And TOXIC. Two years later, in 1985, Sidney Janis returned to TOXIC specifically — dedicating a three-artist exhibition to A-One, Noc, and TOXIC. The institution did not need to do that. It chose to.

It is also the year Basquiat painted Hollywood Africans, a work that has since become one of the most historically charged paintings of its era. TOXIC is named within it. Not as a bystander. As a subject. Across Basquiat’s entire body of work, he is among the most depicted individuals — rivalled, it is said, only by Charlie Parker.

But none of that, TOXIC will tell you, is what 1983 means to him.

For TOXIC, 1983 is something more personal. It is the year he decided, from the inside, that he was an artist. The year the conviction took hold.

That decision was triggered by a single exchange with Basquiat. Looking at what TOXIC was doing across the surfaces of New York — the scale, the command, the visual intelligence — Basquiat asked him simply: “That’s cool. But how are you going to eat with trains?”

It was not a dismissal. It was a recognition. An act of belief, disguised as a provocation. The year TOXIC decided to become an artist was the year another artist told him he already was one.

Everything that follows, follows from that.

In the conversation, TOXIC speaks at length about what ‘ALWAYS EVER SINCE 83’ actually represents — and why it differs from anything he has shown before.

The title, in his own words, is not a reinvention or a relaunch. It is a statement of fact. A declaration of existence. Always ever since — a spin on two words, established since — for a practice that has been continuously in motion for over forty years and shows no sign of stopping.

The exhibition itself sets new paintings, made specifically for this moment, alongside earlier works that map where the practice has been. The new work is personal — TOXIC describes it as working through things, his demons, the questions still being resolved. The earlier work provides the context. Together, they are intended to be read as a single, unbroken story.

He is also direct about the symbols. The forms that repeat across his canvases — the ones people have been quick to interpret on his behalf — are not decorative. They are loaded, in the tradition Rammellzee established. They mean something specific, something that often sits in tension with what institutions and markets have chosen to project onto them.

Watching the conversation is the closest you will get to hearing him explain it himself, before stepping into the room.

Torrick ‘TOXIC’ Ablack is one of the most historically significant figures to emerge from New York’s cultural underground of the early 1980s. A founding member of Tag Master Killers under the mentorship of Rammellzee, TOXIC was present at the defining moments of an era — including Basquiat’s second exhibition with Larry Gagosian in Los Angeles, which gave rise to Hollywood Africans. TOXIC is named within it, not as a peripheral figure, but as a subject. Across Basquiat’s entire body of work, he is the most depicted individual after Charlie Parker.

Exhibited at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1983 alongside Basquiat, Haring, Futura, Rammellzee and Lee Quiñones, and the subject of a dedicated three-artist show at the same gallery in 1985, TOXIC’s institutional credentials are as robust as any artist of his generation. What sets him apart is not proximity to greatness — it is his own unbroken forty-year practice, carried forward without compromise, without leveraging famous names, and without ever allowing the market to define the work.

He is currently represented exclusively in the United Kingdom by Woodbury House, Mayfair.

A Conversation with Torrick ‘TOXIC’ Ablack | Filmed in his Studio in Brittany | Ahead of ‘ALWAYS EVER SINCE 83’

Watch on YouTube here — 30 minutes

‘ALWAYS EVER SINCE 83’ A Solo Exhibition by Torrick ‘TOXIC’ Ablack 15th May — 26th June 2026 Woodbury House, 29 Sackville Street, Mayfair, London, W1S 3DX

New paintings made specifically for this exhibition sit alongside major earlier works dating back to 1983 — the full arc of a practice that began in the Bronx, moved through one of the most significant cultural moments of the twentieth century, survived losses that took nearly everyone else, and arrives here, at this gallery, at this moment, still evolving and still at full force.

Watch the conversation. Understand the story. Then come and see what comes next.

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