Abdus Salaam, born 1989 in Cape Town, South Africa is a cultural fusion of Western, Eastern and African sensibilities. Having formed his earliest memories on a remote African farm without electricity, he spent his time painting and sculpting with natural materials in the mountains with his mother. He unexpectedly moved to Los Angeles at age ten where he would spend his formative teen years delving into the arts, extreme sports, and western cultural realities. 

Abdus Salaam is a self-taught multi-disciplinary artist inspired by natural beauty, ecology and spirituality. Salaam expresses his sensitivity to the metaphysical connotations inherent in nature, materials, forms and colours through works that express notions of time, both intimate and cosmic as well as connections between our planetary, communal and personal state. Contemporary in his mystic abstraction and surreal expressions, his work is rooted in his original poetry, calling from a familiar place to a state of peaceful and intensive longing and oneness - often using materials to explore the immaterial and always working alone so as to imbue his intention into every fibre of his work. Moving freely between mediums, from sculpture to painting, video, photographic 'light paintings’, poetry, and music, he creates poetic worlds, from the intimate to large-scale installation. 

Beauty is the purest protest

Beauty is the purest pain

For the purest beauty is love

Wherein I am most vulnerable 

And human, again.

-Abdus Salaam