BIO

Abdushakur (b. 1985, New York City) is a contemporary artist based between New York and the United Kingdom. He works exclusively in pen and ink on paper, producing dense, non-representational fields through continuous, long-duration accumulation. The practice is defined by extreme procedural constraint: every mark is made by hand, without preparatory drawing, digital intervention, or compositional planning.

The work began in 2011 with a complete break from figurative representation. Since then he has developed a single ongoing corpus, Ṣaḥīfat al-Ṣabr (The Scroll of Patience), formalized in 2026 with a standardized protocol, public session register, and self-administered authentication system. Individual sheets are serialized and released as discrete records of time and labor.

Early studies included programs at Cooper Union and the National Academy School of Fine Art in New York. Works from the current corpus are held in private collections in the United States and Egypt.

STATEMENT OF PRACTICE

Marks accumulate without reference to external form, building dense fields whose only subject is the duration of their own making. The practice operates outside figurative representation, conventional aniconism, and the logic of abstraction. Time—measured in sustained labor across seconds, hours, days, and years—forms the primary material of the work. The work remains ongoing and is complete only at the end of the artist’s life.

CV

Born in 1985, Queens, New York, USA
Resides and works in the United Kingdom

EDUCATION

1990-Present: Self-Taught Artist
2003: Outreach Program, Cooper Union, New York, NY, USA
2008: Summer Scholarship Intensive (Master-level Drawing), The National Academy School of Fine Art, New York, NY, USA

GROUP EXHIBITS

2003, Group Exhibition, Hosted by MoMa, Long Island City, NY, USA
2003, Group Exhibition, Hosted by The Isamu Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, NY, USA
2003: Group Exhibition, Hosted by Cooper Union, New York
2006, MADHAPPY’S F*** Yeah!, San Francisco, CA, USA
2008: Group Exhibition, Hosted by The National Academy School of Fine Art, New York, NY, USA
2010: Group Exhibition, Hosted by Liftie’s Tattoos and Body Piercings, Queens, NY, USA
2012: Art Murmur, Oakland, CA, USA
2013: Sleep No More: Rhyme For a Reason (Performance with Ruben Ospain), The Ritz Theater, Elizabeth, NJ, USA

COLLECTIONS

Private collections in New York, New Jersey, California (USA), Cairo and Manufiyyah (Egypt)