Isaac Abrams, American (1939 - )

Isaac Abrams was born and raised in the New York area. He is a self-taught artist with an academic background in literature, history, science and psychology. He founded the first gallery of Psychedelic Art in the world in 1965. He began working as a self-taught painter in the beginning of 1966. He began working as a sculptor in the 1970's. He began extensive work as an animation artist in 1981. He has always painted

Abrams was the former owner of Coda Gallery. The Coda Gallery was noted for its introduction of Psychedelic Art into the mainstream of American media consciousness. Abrams studied in Austria under the tutelage of Ernst Fuchs whose school and method of painting runs in an unbroken line of students and teachers from Albrecht Durer to the present. Dr. Fuchs' techniques and artistic concepts were profoundly stimulating. Abrams remained in Vienna an additional six months.

Mr. Abrams showed his work in Munich at the Gallery Hartmann and in Vienna at the Gallery Ariadne. Returning to the U.S. in 1973, he moved to upstate New York where he isolated himself for a period of experiment and development in the areas of painting, graphics and video. He also moved into a new area of self-expression: sculpture.

In 1975, Mr. Abrams went to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where working at the Shidoni foundry, he completed the development of the vocabulary of his new sculptural work.

Returning to New York City in 1976, Mr. Abrams established himself as an up-and-coming artist whose work is remarkable both for its technical quality and vision.

He begins his work with a series of loosely conceived juxtapositions and then discovers in those juxtapositions the metaphysical and cosmic concepts which are so often expressed in his art.

His works are sudden leaps into unknown spaces, into free-floating gravityless existences, where angels and demons, concepts and conceptions appear and disappear, where paradoxes proliferate and where each viewing of the painting may bring to the viewer a new and different cross combination of the ele- ments within.

His intentions are to create a painting viewable at any distance from inches to yards or dozens of yards; a piece having a vital life which is not dependent on a single point of view or a single conception of what was within.

A Jungian psychoanalyst, for example, has said that Mr. Abrams' works relate to certain archetypical experiences which are often seen in the dreams and fantasies of her patients; a physicist sees various assertions of the latest thinking about the gravitational effects of large bodies on space, time and the "shape" of the universe.

A biologist may see animals, or microbes, which seem to illustrate his own work. For many people, their concept perception of what Mr. Abrams does is based upon what they themselves are doing.

Mr. Abrams feels that he is an open channel. His work is not limited by his own knowledge. He is open to third forces; the first being himself, the second being the painting; and the third being the forces of unconscious cross-connection of all thoughts into one great mind. Having experienced this unity of all thought forms into the one thought form, Mr. Abrams is capable of reaching into the many areas of human experience, to snatch from the pool of the collective consciousness of all minds, extraordinarily acute perceptions.

Artist's Gallery