Torrick Ablack, better known as TOXIC, will present a major solo exhibition at Woodbury House this summer, bringing together new works and rarely seen early paintings in what the gallery describes as a long-overdue recognition of one of the most historically significant yet underacknowledged figures in contemporary art.
Titled ALWAYS EVER SINCE 83, the exhibition opens with a private view on 14th May 2026 and runs until 26th June 2026 at Woodbury House’s Mayfair space.
Rather than functioning as a retrospective, the exhibition positions 1983 as a defining psychological and artistic turning point for TOXIC — the year he first convinced himself he could become an artist. New paintings made specifically for the exhibition will be shown alongside works dating back to 1983, tracing more than four decades of continuous practice.
TOXIC emerged from the downtown New York scene of the early 1980s alongside figures including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Futura, Lee Quiñones and Rammellzee. In 1983 he participated in the landmark Post-Graffiti exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, placing graffiti and street-based practices within the context of institutional contemporary art.
“TOXIC occupies a position in art history that has never been fully articulated – until now. He was not on the periphery of one of the most significant cultural moments of the twentieth century. He was at the centre of it. This exhibition is our attempt to make that impossible to ignore. Not through nostalgia, and not through association – but through the work itself, which is currently at the most powerful and searching point of his entire career. ‘ALWAYS EVER SINCE 83’ is the show we have been building towards. It is a statement – for TOXIC, for Woodbury House, and for everyone who has followed this story and known that it deserved to be told properly.”
Joseph Bannan, Partner, Woodbury House
That same year, TOXIC travelled to Los Angeles alongside Basquiat and Rammellzee during Basquiat’s second exhibition with Larry Gagosian. The trip would later become immortalised in Basquiat’s iconic painting Hollywood Africans, in which TOXIC appears not as a background figure but as a central subject within Basquiat’s meditation on race, celebrity and cultural exploitation.
The exhibition also foregrounds the intellectual influence of Rammellzee and his theory of Ikonoklast Panzerism — a radical philosophy that treated language and symbols as sites of resistance against structures of cultural control. That legacy remains embedded within TOXIC’s visual language, where symbols function less as decorative forms than as coded and continually shifting systems of meaning.
The new paintings presented in ALWAYS EVER SINCE 83 continue this evolving vocabulary. Built through layered acrylic grounds and fast-moving spray paint gestures, the works oscillate between abstraction and figuration, instinct and control. Symbols recur throughout the compositions, revisited not out of nostalgia but through what the artist describes as an ongoing need to confront unresolved questions.
The exhibition also reflects on survival and continuity within a generation marked by loss. Following the deaths of Basquiat in 1988, fellow artist A-One in 2001 and Rammellzee in 2010, TOXIC remains one of the few direct witnesses to that formative downtown era still actively extending its ideas forward.
While many narratives surrounding the early graffiti movement have since become mythologised, TOXIC’s practice has continued independently, resisting easy categorisation and refusing to rely on association or nostalgia.
At Woodbury House, ALWAYS EVER SINCE 83 positions that sustained practice not as historical footnote, but as a vital and ongoing contribution to contemporary art.
TOXIC: ALWAYS EVER SINCE 83 runs from 14th May to 26th June 2026 at Woodbury House, Mayfair, London.
All images courtesy the artist & Woodbury House
About the artist
Torrick Ablack, known professionally as TOXIC (b. 1965), is a seminal figure to emerge from the South Bronx during the birth of hip-hop culture in the early 1980s. Born in New York City, TOXIC grew up immersed in the music, movement and visual language that shaped a generation. His early work on subway trains and city walls placed him at the centre of graffiti’s most formative period.
A defining chapter in his career came through his close association with Rammellzee and the legendary Tag Master Killers (TMK) crew. Under Rammellzee’s influence, TOXIC was exposed to graffiti as coded language — a system of symbols, futurism and resistance that extended far beyond aesthetics. His work featured in pivotal exhibitions that helped shift graffiti into the contemporary art conversation, including shows at Fashion Moda and the Sidney Janis Gallery.
In 1983, TOXIC was immortalised in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s ‘Hollywood Africans’ alongside Basquiat and Rammellzee — a powerful cultural document addressing race, visibility and identity within the art world. His work has since been included in major museum exhibitions such as ‘Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation’ (MFA Boston) and ‘City As Canvas’ (Museum of the City of New York), and is held in significant institutional collections including the Brooklyn Museum.
Woodbury House is TOXIC’s exclusive gallery partner.
