Abebe Zelelew
The Elegance of Effort

The artistry of Abebe Zelelew lies, in part, in the effort it takes to achieve some of his complex carved and painted works. Like the subject he depicts, there is a marriage of elegance and effort, and the result is a tangible expression of the dignity of the human condition.

Beginning first with canvas and goatskin as substrates for his vision, he moved into using wood, which has a long tradition in African art. While woodcarving is arduous work, Abebe is enamored of the permanence of the medium and of its inherent resonance with Christian, Muslim, and animistic traditions.

Daily life in Ethiopia, as seen through Abebe’s eyes and communicated on his panels, is distilled into bright,
intensely worked or patterned surfaces. While the images themselves might describe sorrow, joy, familial affection, or farming, building, and food preparation, the treatment of these prosaic themes are given significance and depth through the artist’s intensive intervention.

Andarge Asfaw
Ethiopia from the Heart

Washington, D.C. photographer, Andargé Asfaw, returned to the Ethiopia of his youth and found a country changed by environmental stresses, war, poverty, and disease. He looked closer and discovered there was much that could be saved—if he could make people see it through his eyes. Armed with the mission of increasing environmental and cultural awareness through his work, Andargé traveled throughout Ethiopia, capturing images that moved him and would, hopefully, inspire others to action. He brings his sensibility as an award-winning commercial and fine arts photographer to the body of work in the exhibiton and to his book, Ethiopia From the Heart. Andargé will be signing his book at the opening receptions. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the book goes to environmental organizations combatting deforestation in Ethiopia.

Wordplay
The Art of Wosene Worke Kosrof

Born in Ethiopia in 1950, Wosene Worke Kosrof is a contemporary artist of international acclaim. Best known for his inventive renderings of the Amharic script—one of the oldest indigenous to Africa—Wosene is a master translator of human experience. His richly textured, lyrical paintings allow us to “see” the sounds, smells, rhythms and spaces that surround and inspire him. Be it the improvisational impulse of American jazz, the pungent waft of roasting coffee beans, the lilting sound of an Amharic prayer, or the psychic violence of political oppression, Wosene’s art takes us beyond the canvas into a deeply personal exploration of, in his words, the “drama of human life.”

Academically trained as a fine artist in both Ethiopia and the United States, Wosene was among the first African contemporary artists to gain critical attention on the international art scene. However, having lived outside Ethiopia since the late 1970s, the artist draws from all of the places he has called home, and as such, resists fixed and facile labels that characterize him or his art as essentially “African.” Indeed, it is this ability to elude category, the familiar and the foreign, tradition and modernity, that has made Wosene’s work compelling to such wide-ranging audiences.

The plasticity of the written word—particularly of his native Amharic—has fascinated Wosene for over 30 years. As a young art student in Addis in the early 70s, his first experimentations with abstraction were inspired by the rich iconographic and written traditions of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, where word and image are deployed to create aesthetically compelling objects of devotion and healing. In Wosene’s hands, however, words became images, as he stretched and inverted their letters, and scattered them across the canvas. Discovering this slippage between the visual and literal dimensions of script amounted to a kind of epiphany that revealed to him the aesthetic, sensory, even kinetic potential of the written word.

An excerpt from Words Unbound: Reflections on the Art of Wosene Worke Kosrof by Allyson Purpura, PhD, Consulting Curator, The University of Michigan Museum of Art

Rattling Color
Mekbib Gebertsadik and Meseret Desta

Mekbib received his BFA with honors from Addis Abeba University of Fine Arts, with a broad emphasis on painting and illustration in all media. Subsequently, he added to his repertoire a degree in graphic design, including internet technologies and software programs. Mekbib has exhibited extensively in Ethiopia and other countries prior to coming to the United States with his wife, Meseret, in 2001. Mekbib has created art his entire life. Upon completing his higher education, Mekbib worked as a full-time studio artist, winning an international competition in 2000 in the Netherlands called, The Reason to Love the Earth. His work concentrates on African motifs and traditions, both in color palette and technique. Making use of two-dimensional imagery and generous textural application, Mekbib intentionally references traditional African art forms, contributing to the establishment of a movement he calls, “Africanism.”

Meseret graduated with distinction from the Addis Abeba University of Fine Arts where she concentrated on mural art. After several exhibitions to her credit in Addis Abeba and abroad, Meseret moved to the United States to study graphic arts, web design, and animation. Since then, her work has been included in several exhibitions in the Washington, D.C. area. Meseret is a passionate colorist, using a palette that allows the eye of each viewer to mix the colors uniquely. She intends her paintings to exist in a liminal world that eases the distinctions between physical, intellectual, and spiritual spheres.

Zimbabwe Stone
From the collection of Dawit Yoseph

Stone sculpture from Zimbabwe is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating from around 1956. Ancient precedents include the rock art and ruins at the site of Great Zimbabwe (1250–1450 ce) and indigenous object-making traditions, but neither of these seem to have direct links to the present work. Rather, the proliferation of stone artwork one finds in Zimbabwe today may be inspired by a post-independence focus on cultural patrimony, freedom of expression, and awareness of art as an essential part of the nation’s heritage.

The works in this exhibition were collected over a period beginning in 1992, when Dawit Yoseph was proprietor of the African Art Gallery in Dallas, Texas. He was attracted to the lushness of form, which invites touch; the technical virtuousity of representational carvers; and the primeval quality of each artist’s expression. The sculptures in this exhibition are created by some of Zimbabwe’s best known artists: Richard Mteki, Zachariah Njobo, and Thomas Tandi. Also represented are anonymous works found in markets and homes, but which still exhibit the great talent of rural, naive carvers.

Celebration of Makeda

Elsabeth Atnafu is a free spirit—creating works of art that honor her internal passions, as much ashistorical themes and influences in the world around her.

The current exhibition, “Celebration of Makeda,” captures a significant portion of her work, focusing on the historical, metaphorical character, Makeda, or Queen of Sheba, who visited King Solomon in Israel and returned to Ethiopia enlarged by his wisdom and his son. Makeda is Everywoman and Atnafu sees her as a voice for selfrespect, for living in the present, and for creating your way out of life’s challenges. In the paintings, Sheba is illustrating the many sides of love, dreaming, manifesting peace, or riding donkeys that wear taxis like rollerskates. Always, Sheba is crowned as the queen that she is, with flowers or fantastic hats that Atnafu makes, literally, to crown visitors to the exhibition. While some works are mysterious and reflective, the most recent pieces are rendered as joyful examples of what it is to live (and to paint) without fear.

Meet the Artists

Visit Addis Art Gallery to see an array of spectacular, contemporary works of art by Ethiopian artists. Paintings, photographs, and mixed media constructions are represented in this collection mounted especially for the week-long festivities, July 1–9, 2006.

Antonio Fiorente
Elsabeth Atnafu
Esseye Medhin
Girma Kifle Meskel
Merid Tizazu
Meseret Desta
Mekbib Gebertsadik
Nebyou Tesfaye
Tadesse Mesfin
Tamrat Fekadu
Tesfaye Legesse
Wondwossen Beyene
Yohannes Tesfaye
Yosef Kebede

The Lure of Women

Since finishing his university education in 1991, Shiferaw has been a painter. His subject is Ethiopian women—going about their lives, socializing with each other, cap-tured in private reflective moments. Although Shiferaw cannot explain how he became captivated and why he has continued to paint women for so many years, he knows that his personal exploration and growth as an artist is facilitated by them. He uses color to express his emotions and changes in technique to expand his creative repertoire.

Rooted in hieratic symbols of the Coptic faith and inspired by modernist Ethiopian movements, Shiferaw’s paintings offer a mosaic of influences applied to intimate, abstract portraits of daily life. The result is work that speaks to everyone with universal symbols of dignity and beauty.

The current exhibition consists of examples from a continuous river of artistic accomplishment. This group of paintings is not informed by chronology; rather, they are individual pieces picked from an unwavering body of work.

Yohannes Tesfaye
Two- and Three-dimensional paintings

One is struck immediately by the exuberance and implied physicality of Yohannes Tesfaye’s paintings. There are no self-imposed limitations, no endless variations on successful themes. This artist is exploring and doing so with a great deal of confidence and joy.

Schooled in classical technique and traditional subject matter, Yohannes stayed within these academic restrictions just long enough to complete his formal education (he received his Diploma from the Addis Abeba University Fine Arts School in 2001). Having learned the rules, he set about breaking them.

It is his relative isolation from the icons of contemporary art that make this body of work so interesting to contemplate and behold. There is feral energy and a freedom from intellectualization that speaks directly to observers and rewards them with a rare and honest talent.