Abed Abdi
1942– · Palestinian painter, sculptor and graphic designer
Abed Abdi (born in Haifa, 1942) is a Palestinian painter, graphic designer, sculptor and art lecturer. Born in Haifa in February 1942, he is known for his murals and memorial monuments in Galilee and is described in his sources as the first Palestinian to build monumental art on native soil.
Abdi worked as a blacksmith and illustrated Arabic-language publications printed in Israel. He held his first exhibition in Tel Aviv in 1962 and then studied at the Fine Arts Academy in Dresden, where his teachers included Lea Grundig, Gerhard Bondzin and Gerhard Kettner. His masterwork there earned second prize, which gave him an extra year to specialize in murals and environmental sculpture. He returned to Haifa in 1972, working as a graphic designer for several Arabic-language publications, teaching art and painting murals.
His Galilee monuments blend allegory and remembrance: a narrative mural about Elijah's defiance and survival, and a bronze memorial for Land Day. In 1977 he made a sculpture marking the Land Day of 1976, and in 1984 a monument for the 75th anniversary of the Galilean municipality of Shefa Amr. He has also painted murals in Haifa, Jaffa and Nazareth.
His work has been shown in Qatar, Israel, Belgium and Bulgaria, and he has taken part in more than forty-five group exhibitions, among them the joint Palestinian-Israeli show "It's possible", which toured the United States and Germany between 1988 and 1990. Haifa awarded him the Hermann Struck prize in 1973 and again in 1999.
He has also been a driving force in cultural life: he founded the Ibda' society for visual arts in the Arab Israeli sector and the Ara belle workshop in Haifa, is active in the Haifa branch of the Israeli Association of Painters and Sculptors, and has taught fine arts at the Arab Pedagogical College in Haifa since 1985. His legacy lies in building bridges between Palestinian and Israeli artists through joint exhibitions.