BANDUNG
With a name that references the city of Bandung, an Indonesian city, known in part for being the site of the first Asian-African conference in 1955, Bandung utilizes batik from Indonesia as a collaged element, incorporating its patterns in the service of a shimmering abstraction. One of a small section of works in Abad’s Endless Blues series named for a specific locality across Indonesia, Bandung holds an emotive sense of the place it is named for, a celebration of place-ness through something beyond representation.

ENDLESS BLUES SERIES
With a majority of the works made in the aftermath of 9/11 and her cancer diagnosis, Abad's Endless Blues series turns entirely toward the abstract at the end of her life. In the face of the immensity of these developments, Abad responded to her emotions by turning inward and spending hours in her studio, listening to blues music as she painted. Works in Endless Blues are characterized by the melancholic and nostalgic trance-like rhythm of the music that has been a constant inspiration for her. For Abad, Endless Blues is like the Blues, “always strong, sometimes sad, a bit nostalgic, and very colorful.”