Rock’n’Roll Raiders is an immersive experience blurring the boundary between art and music. The show aims to recreate the energy and euphoria that are experienced at a rock’n’roll concert. Artist Abdul Vas wants you to be carried away by the vibrancy of his art.
This large-format multidisciplinary exhibition is to be presented on a stage with a large metal structure filled with lights, spotlights, projection screens, audio equipment, truss structures, lifting towers and a legendary American Peterbilt truck, a Cucarachón, in Vas own words.
Abdul Vas will present a series of new paintings depicting portraits of AC/DC’s musicians in which the artist addresses human psychology as a complex and diverse subject, combining his obsessions with NASCAR racing and the music of AC/DC to transmit all the energy and euphoria experienced at rock’n’roll concerts through his paintings. Painting is where Vas exhibits his most precise and serene poetics of power. In it he upholds this surprising medium to channel and process the excessive torrent of images surrounding him in his world, striving to achieve a new conceptualization of classical painting by taking it to the limit of simplificatio.
The way in which the artist brings together individual elements to form a new whole through the juxtaposition of images engenders an unsettling atmosphere that oscillates between the abstract and the narrative, the expressive and the iconic, complex techniques and other simple and crude ones, as Vas encourages us to let ourselves be swept away by his works’ vitality.
The first exhibition will be held on 25th February 2022 at the WiZink Center in Madrid, a venue where blockbuster artists like AC/DC, Muse, U2, Metallica and Bruce Springsteen have performed. His next exhibitions will be in Miami in December 2022, and then in places like Shanghai, Paris, Hong Kong, Miami and Tokyo.
“I wanted to make art inspired by the power of AC/DC’s music, so it was necessary for me to break with the academic past of art, and with all the established trends. I simply want my work to capture the rhythm and essence of AC/DC, the greatest Rock’n’Roll band of all time.”
Abdul Vas
oil on linen, 62.9 x 76.7 in / 160 x 195 cm
Abdul Vas Rock´n´Roll Raiders World Tour Wizink Center Madrid greycoda.com/the-exhibition-abdul-vas/ 25th February 2022
About the artist
Abdul Vas lives and works in Madrid and Ho Chi Minh City. His works have been exhibited in the United States, Latin America, Asia, and Europe, and included in various international collections. They have also been displayed at group exhibitions at the Shibuya Center Gai in Tokyo; The Composing Rooms, in Berlin; Amp Tokyo Space; White Box, in New York; Beo Project, in Belgrade; Arcadia Missa Gallery, in London; Matadero, in Madrid; the Atlantic Center of Modern Art (CAAM), in Las Palmas de Canarias (Spain); and the 2009 Beijing Biennial, among others.
