Abby Shahn
Abby Shahn is a protest artist with a very distinguished family provenance.
What all of Shahn’s work has in common is an underlying political agenda articulated in an abstract vocabulary of colour, form, and gesture.
Her father, Ben Shahn (1898 - 1969), was a noted American artist and social realist who once worked with the great muralist Diego Rivera. He is best known for his works of social realis many based on his left-wing political views. Between May and June of 1933, he worked as assistant to Diego Rivera while Rivera executed the Rockefeller Center mural. Her mother, Bernarda Bryson Shahn, was also a progressive realist, a painter and lithographer, Her sister Judith Shahn (1929-2009) was born in Paris. She was a painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and graphic artist. Her drawings appeared in The New Yorker magazine from 1958 to1992. Her brother Jonathan Shahn born in 1938 was an accomplished sculptor
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Abby Shahn started working in New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s and was a friend and contemporary of many of the most famous artists of the day
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Tired of working in a huge metropolis, in the late 1960s she and her lifelong partner Fang moved to a 120 acre secluded rural property in Maine
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Her main studio on her property in Maine is a separate building in the field behind her house. The studio barely has any amenities and is heated in winter with wood and has no running water. She also keeps a small studio in her home in order to work when the weather doesn’t allow her to make the walk to her primary studio.
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“I feel that the isolation from the ‘art world’ and from current trends in art has had both good and bad effects.... I’m more than glad to be free of the dictates of style and of the marketplace. I like my ideas to develop at their own pace. I love growing my garden, tending my fires, picking wild mushrooms, etc. At the same time, I feel fortunate to be part of a loose group of artists scattered around in the boondocks who have evolved in many different ways, sometimes overlapping with current ideas floating around the “big city”, sometimes veering off in crazy and unexpected directions.
Abby Shahn
"I believe that all painting is abstract".
Abby Shahn has been living and working in Maine since 1969. She is one of the state's most important and celebrated artists. Her work hovers between the figurative and the non-objective, showing that no boundaries are needed. She explains, "I believe that all painting is abstract. However, even in the most non-objective paintings, I always find there is an illusion of space that is a kind of realism." Critic Ken Greenleaf describes Shahn's ability to paint, as being like a highly-skilled jazz performer, she just picks up the horn and blows it, and what comes out has coherence, order, and emotional resonance. She sees rhythm as the basis of all art.
Artist isolated from the artworld
“I feel that the isolation from the ‘art world’ and from current trends in art has had both good and bad effects"
ABBY SHAHN
In 2020 Abby had an exhibition in Maine looking back over the previous 50 Years. A retrospective look at the artist’s works through paintings, drawings, hand-made books, three-dimensional objects, and a site-specific installation.
ABBY SHAHN
Ben Shan and almost all members of his family were involved in the arts and in politics
Abby Shahn
The Rust world
Suddenly a series of ghostly figures emerge from chromatic space, and an alcove for her newest work entitled “Rust World.”
Abby with her rust painting series
The thing I like about rust is that it keeps changing
I was putting down paint and then finding images on the paint. For a while, I was finding faces. I hoped the faces in the images were particular, not generic. This seemed like a still from an English movie. It’s kind of foggy. The lady looks as if the weather is damp and cold. She had to button her coat up tight.
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