The Palestinian painter Abed Abi studied (born 1942) at the art academy HfBK in Dresden between 1964 and 1971. In an interview, he talks about his friendhship with Lea Grundig and he recalls how his studies shaped his life’s work as an artist.
Interview with Abed Abdi, video call between Haifa and Berlin, 19.04.2022
The painter Abed Abdi came from Haifa (Israel) to Dresden in 1964 through an arrangement by the Communist Party of Israel. He had been personally recommended by Lea Grundig (1906-1977), who later was his teacher at the University of Fine Arts (Hochschule für Bildende Künste) in Dresden alongside Gerhard Bondzin, Gerhard Kettner und Günter Horlbeck.
Abdi’s artistic sujets include impressions of life in the GDR and portraits of fellow students, but also draw on his experiences of being a refugee and of losing one’s home. They are based on his childhood memories of the Nakba, the displacement of Arabic Palestinians from the territory of Israel around 1948. The theme of refugees connected him with Lea Grundig, who as a Jew emigrated from Germany to Palestine during the Holocaust and also artistically processed her own experiences of flight.
Abed Abdi, Uprooting, 1967, ink on paper, 41x32cm, in the artist's private possession. Photo: Abed Abdi
Abed Abdi held a joint exhibition in 1966 with several foreign students of the art academy, Dino di Rosa from Chile, Elly Johnson from Norway, Elis Kankkunen from Finnland, and Mauricio Boizeau from Columbia. Other fellow students from the GDR included Sigrid Noack, Elke Hopfe und Rainer Zille. In 1970, Abdi graduated with a specialisation in Mural Painting with a work on the subject of the “German-Arabic-Friendship“. In the video interview Abdi recounts how he came to study in the GDR and describes how his time in Dresden influences his art until today.
Poster for the joint exhibition Gaststudenten in der Hochschule für Bildende Künste, 1966. Photo: Abed Abdi
Interview with Abed Abdi, video call between Haifa and Berlin, 19.04.2022
Throughout his studies, Abdi created numerous graphics, drawings and paintings which he documents in his private digital archive: https://abedabdi.com/art-works/1960s-b/. He also specialized in mural techniques, and between his graduation and his return to Haifa in 1971, he executed a colourful sgrafitto in a building of the HfBK in Dresden. Another sgrafitto was done in the same room by the Iraqi student Sami Hakki. In this second interview Abdi speaks about his art and he tells the story of how the sgrafitto allowed him to marry his wife. Both murals still exist in the HfBK, and were inspected by the conservation specialist Valentin Bauer in 2020.
After the German reunification in 1990, Abdi returned to Germany for several exhibitions, including in Bad Freienwalde, Düsseldorf and Berlin. He now lives in Israel and Hungary and he aims to use his art to foster a peaceful intercultural dialogue between Israel and Palestine.
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