TOXIC

Torrick Ablack, who has written as TOXIC since the late 1970s, was born in 1965 and grew up in the South Bronx. He began painting subway cars as a child and by fourteen was exhibiting at Fashion Moda, the South Bronx alternative space run by Stefan Eins that gave the first generation of writers a room to work in. He was taken on by Sidney Janis Gallery at seventeen.

He painted with Kool Koor and A-One as the Tag Master Killers, and in 1982 formed the Hollywood Africans with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Rammellzee — a name Basquiat gave the three of them and used as the title of the painting in which all three appear, now held by the Whitney Museum of American Art. That association placed Toxic at the centre of the downtown scene while he was still in his teens, and the Basquiat connection has followed him ever since.

The paintings are dense and linguistic. Letters, numbers, diagrams, crossings-out and fragments of text accumulate across the surface in a hand that stays close to writing even when the work is fully abstract. The vocabulary is closer to the notebook page than to the train panel: things written down, revised, struck through and written again. Where his New York contemporaries worked toward legibility, Toxic worked toward density, and the pictures reward reading rather than recognition.

He moved to Europe in the 1980s and has exhibited there since, across France, Belgium and Italy. His work was included in Arte di Frontiera at the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna in Bologna in 1984, one of the early museum exhibitions devoted to New York graffiti, alongside Basquiat, Futura, Haring and Crash.

More recently he has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Woodbury House in London — All Imperfections Included in 2024 and Always Ever Since '83 in 2026 — and his work was included in City as Canvas at the Museum of the City of New York in 2014 and Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2020. His work is held in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum.

SELECTED CV

Born 1965, Bronx, New York, NY, USA

Lives and works in Europe

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2026 Always Ever Since 83, Woodbury House, London, United Kingdom

2024 All Imperfections Included, Woodbury House, London, United Kingdom

2019 Torrick “TOXIC” Ablack — Project 48-17/18, ArtCan Gallery, Marseille, France

Selected Group Exhibitions

2021 Ghost DNA, Ghost Galerie, Paris, France

2019 En mémoire des Hollywood Africans (Toxic, Basquiat, Rammellzee), Taglialatella Galleries, Paris, France

1984 Classical American Graffiti Writers and High Graffiti Artists, Galerie Thomas, Munich, Germany

1983 Post-Graffiti, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, NY, USA

1982 Fashion Moda, New York, NY, USA

Museum and Institutional Exhibitions

2020 Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA

1984 Rapid Enamel: The Art of Graffiti, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

1983 Arte di Frontiera: New York Graffiti, Galleria comunale d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy

1982 documenta 7, Kassel, Germany

Selected Public Commissions and Projects

1982 Founding member, with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Rammellzee, of the Hollywood Africans