Group Exhibition | Connected Threads, 2024

Connected Threads

Contemporary Art from the Horn of Africa and Diaspora

Connected Threads

Contemporary Art from the Horn of Africa and Diaspora

8 May - 31 May 2024

Featured Artists:

Dawit Adnew

Adiskidan Ambaye

Tesfaye Bekele

Merikokeb Berhanu

Tizta Berhanu

Noah Beyene

Henok Getachew

Engdaye Lemma

Tadesse Mesfin

Helina Metaferia

Selome Muleta

Nirit Takele

Tesfaye Urgessa

Connected Threads

Contemporary Art from the Horn of Africa and Diaspora

Addis Fine Art is thrilled to present a group exhibition of paintings, textile, and mixed-media works by artists from Ethiopia and its diasporas in New York this May. Hosted by the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) at their Lower East Side gallery space, the exhibition brings together a cross section of artists in different stages of their careers. The exhibition features Dawit Adnew, Adiskidan Ambaye, Tesfaye Bekele, Merikokeb Berhanu, Tizta Berhanu, Noah Beyene, Henok Getachew, Engdaye Lemma, Tadesse Mesfin, Helina Metaferia, Selome Muleta, Nirit Takele, and Tesfaye Urgessa.

This group show highlights the ongoing contributions of artists from the Horn of Africa, both on and off the continent, at a moment when Ethiopia’s rich art history is gaining increasing recognition. Recent institutional surveys such as Africa and Byzantium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY and Ethiopia at the Crossroads travelling between the Walters Museum, Baltimore, MD, the Peabody Essex Museum of Art, Salem, MA, and the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH speak to the growing international focus on Ethiopian and East African art.

Ethiopian American artist Julie Mehretu recently unveiled the largest solo presentation of her work to date at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy to coincide with the 2024 Venice Biennale, and this year’s Biennale Arte also inaugurates the first ever Ethiopia National Pavilion with paintings by Tesfaye Urgessa curated by Lemn Sissay.

We are excited to have the opportunity to contribute to this long overdue global dialogue with this presentation of artists from across our programme, and to continue to shine a light on the richness and diversity of contemporary talent from the region, defined by transnational and cross-generational links.

Dawit Adnew

Fraternalisation , 2022

Acrylic on canvas

53⅛ x 53⅛ in.

135 x 135 cm.

Dawit Adnew

Dawit Adnew's (b. 1973) paintings conjure a sumptuous, dreamlike idyll, where figures pose languorously in beautifully patterned dresses in gardens overflowing with luxuriant plants, flowers, and fruits. An atmosphere of perpetual calm prevails, a suggestion of twilight, where colour and pattern are sources of pure pleasure, as in Matisse or Gauguin. His practice is informed by studies in African masks and iconography, and his use of patterns and fabric emerges from his experience as a textile designer.

Dawit is based in Addis Ababa and studied at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design. Dawit has been included in various exhibitions in London, Addis Ababa, Kenya, and Malta.

Adiskidan Ambaye

Adiskidan Ambaye (b. 1977) was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where she lived until the age of sixteen. Adiskidan would then move first to Frankfurt in Germany to study, before moving again four years later to Minnesota to study fine art at MCAD, specializing in furniture design. For Adiskidan Ambaye, sculpture and drawing are deeply interwoven. The complex abstract sculptures she handcrafts from wood and other found materials are nearly always preceded by gestural two-dimensional sketches, which delineate the foundations for her three-dimensional compositions.

Adiskidan's work has been included in solo and group exhibitions across the United States, as well as in Frankfurt, Addis Ababa, Stockholm, Ghana, and Abu Dhabi.

2023

43¼ x 31½ in.

110 x 80 cm

Adiskidan Ambaye Affection ,

Oil on canvas

47¼ x 47¼ in.

120 x 120 cm

Tesfaye Bekele Mirroring , 2022

Acrylic on canvas

Tesfaye Bekele

Tesfaye Bekele (b. 1982) grew up in Addis Ababa during a shifting cultural and political landscape in the country. As a young child he began drawing art out of interest as a way to document the images in his community. In 2007 he entered the Addis Ababa University Alle School of Fine Arts and Design to pursue a degree in Art Education. Tesfaye currently teaches at the School of Fine Arts and participates in numerous group exhibitions and art workshops.

Tesfaye often paints with the canvas laid on the ground, creating imagined spaces in which to place the body. His knowledge of the structures of the human organism, derived from his studies of biology and physiology, underpins his intuitive explorations of intricate networks of synapses, muscles and bones, branching out inskeins of entangled lines and colour applied by dripping, scratching and pouring paint. The results are powerful expressions of a will to overcome limitations and find fulfilment in the liberties of creating art.

Merikokeb Berhanu

Merikokeb Berhanu (b. 1977, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Addis Ababa University, Alle School Fine Arts and Design in 2002, where she studied painting under the tutelage of a generation of Ethiopian modernist painters. Here, she developed her work, crafting her idiosyncratic visual language that toes the line between pure abstraction and recognisable form.

Merikokeb’s immigration to Maryland, USA in 2017 marked a time of sudden and intense change in all aspects of her life, a shift that is nowhere more evident than in her paintings. While Merikokeb’s work has always had a focus on lifeforms and biomorphic imagery, at this point she started to gravitate towards the more vibrant hues that define her latest paintings. New symbols – a circuit board structure, the skeletal remains of fish – began to emerge throughout Merikokeb’s work as she grappled with the implications of a society estranged from nature.

In addition to her presentations with Addis Fine Art, Merikokeb has recently featured in several dual and group exhibitions, including Tête-Bêche , Bortolami Gallery, New York (2024), Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection, curated by Cecilia Alemani, Shah Garg Foundation, New York (2023), Milk of Dreams: The 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (2022), and Where Cloudy Waters Collide , Pippy Houldsworth, London, UK (2022). Her work is part of the travelling exhibition Ethiopia at the Crossroads at Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (2023), Peabody Essex Museum, Salem (2024), and Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo (2024).

60 x 40 in.

152.4 x 101.6 cm

Merikokeb Berhanu Untitled XCII , 2024

Acrylic on canvas

Love Triangle , 2023

43¼ x 43¼ in.

110 x 110 cm.

Tizta Berhanu

Oil on Canvas

Tizta Berhanu

Tizta Berhanu (b. 1991) was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where she has lived and worked her entire life. She graduated in 2013 from the Addis Ababa University, Alle School of Fine Arts and Design where she studied under the influential modernist painter Tadesse Mesfin.

Trained as a figurative painter, Tizta uses the medium to introspectively delve into human emotions, painting with expressive swirling brush strokes. The figures in her work often express an array of sentiments, some comfort and embrace one another, whilst others are found isolated and searching in the backdrop of the enigmatic canvases.

The entangled nature of Tizta’s compositions alludes to the importance of community in providing support for one another, an essential trait in Ethiopian culture. Tizta’s bold use of colour infuses each painting with its own distinctive emotional tone; her lustrous red paintings, for instance, conjure images of love and passion, whilst the oceanic blue works wash the viewer in a wave of despondency.

Noah Beyene

Born in Stockholm to a Swedish mother, a teacher, and an Ethiopian father, an artist, Noah Beyene's (b. 1993) works often depict those close to him, friends and family. Beyene’s paintings feel like tableau vivants in oil paint: they are unflinching stories, scenes, snapshots into a life, while always oscillating between the literal and the profound. Beyene knows how much is at stake in an attentive life, and how much meaning can be tenuously held, like an over-heating valve, in the parts that keep us connected to those we love.

As in all his paintings, Beyene imbues a profound look of fidelity to our lives, not unlike a nineteenth-century realist playwright, while always representing a heightened atmosphere of feeling that cannot be directly represented but lurks, in a sideways expression or fleeting glance, somewhere in the shadows, painfully there and yet unseen. More than anything else, Beyene is willing to risk the big gesture: to take hold of the problem of figurative painting in an age of over-saturation of stylised image-making, and render the form newly exciting and daring.

145.00 x 110.00 cm

Noah Beyene

Reveal Twice As Much , 2024 Oil on linen

57⅛ x 43¼ in.

Henok Getachew

Unlearning Territories 7, 2024

Acrylic, maps and cartons on plastic panel

31½ x 28 in.

80 x 71 cm

Henok Getachew

Henok Getachew started practising art at a very early age, and continued to develop it until he joined the physics department at Debub University, in Ethiopia in 2001. Two years later, he stopped studying Physics and joined Addis Ababa University’s Alle school of Fine Arts and Design, later graduating with a BA in Art Education in 2008. Now based in Berlin, he has since experimented with several concepts and techniques ranging from performances, to painting, to mixed media works.

He usually creates his artworks intuitively from a range of found materials and functional objects, and recent pieces have focused on creating wall-hanging sculptural collages from maps. Through his works, he aims to raise critical discussions around consumerism, climate change, and the impacts of technology on society. He also explores the blurred boundaries between scientific thinking, philosophy, and art. The artist’s work has been shown in Berlin, Dresden, Addis Ababa, and Dar es Salaam.

Engdaye Lemma

Engdaye Lemma’s (b. 1980) experimental print-making practice synthesises screen-printing, painting and collage media. Exploring the multiple ways in which life and culture intertwine, his works are rigorous interrogations of the textures of society. He is inspired by ethnography whilst also taking seriously the power of art to bridge the gap between knowledge and lived experience. Lemma, who lives and works in Addis Ababa, takes as his subject city life. He often reflects on the ways in which public space and private space overlap in urban environments.

Engdaye Lemma was born and raised in Desse City, Ethiopia. His interest in visual art was cultivated at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design where he received his Bachelors of Fine Arts from Alle School of Fine Arts and Design and was part of the school’s first print-making cohort. Lemma now teaches at the School of Fine Arts and collaborates with several of his former teachers and inspirations including Zerihun Yetmgeta, Getachew Yoseph, Agegehu Adane, and Berhanu Ashagre.

( the sky beyond the sky ),

53⅛ x 57⅛ in. 135 x 145 cm

Engdaye Lemma

2023

Mixed Media

Column

Oil on canvas

70⅞ x 57⅛ in.

180.00 x 145.00 cm.

Tadesse Mesfin

of Rhythm I, 2022

Tadesse Mesfin

Tadesse Mesfin (b. 1953) lives and works in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. With an artistic career spanning more than five decades, Mesfin’s painterly style has been greatly influenced by his early education under the renowned Ethiopian modernist Gebre Kristos Desta. He then spent seven years studying at the Soviet Union Leningrad Academy of Painting, Architecture and Sculpture, where he received an MFA in painting before returning to Ethiopia in 1984.

Alongside his own figurative painting practice, Mesfin has also served for several decades as a professor at the influential Addis Ababa University Alle School of Fine Art and Design. Among the generations of painters he has taught are Addis Gezehagn, Ermias Kifleyesus, Merikokeb Berhanu and Tesfaye Urgessa.

Mesfin’s work celebraties the women who work as small-holder vendors in markets scattered across Ethiopian cities, who can typically be found kneeling among their wares awaiting customers. Often overlooked by society, in Mesfin’s work these women are brought to the foreground, and the observer is invited to appreciate their importance to the communities they serve. Following the Ethiopian modernist tradition of including Amharic alphabetic script in paintings, Mesfin interprets the human figures as personified lettering, elongating and flattening them into horizontal rows.

Helina Metaferia

Helina Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist working across collage, assemblage, video, performance, and social engagement. Her work integrates archives, somatic studies, and dialogical practices, creating overlooked narratives that amplify BIPOC/femme bodies.

A continuation of the artist's presentation at the Sharjah Biennial in 2023, Metaferia's latest tapestry works are all subtitled with names of traditional storyellers across the African continent, and include silk-screened archival imagery of civil rights protests. The hand-stitched patchwork of the images echoes African-American quilting traditions, which historically have centred storytelling and community building amongst women.

Metaferia received her MFA from Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent solo exhibitions include Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2022); New York University's The Gallatin Galleries, New York, NY (2021); Michigan State University's Scene Metrospace Gallery, East Lansing, MI (2019); and Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2017). Metaferia's work is included in the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates (2023), the Tennessee Triennial through the Frist Art Museum and Fisk University Art Gallery (2023), and group exhibitions at ICA San Francisco (2023) and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2019).

Silkscreened fabric, acrylic, yarn and rope

48 x 96 in.

121.92 x 243.84 cm

Helina Metaferia Tapestry (Gawlo) , 2023

Immersion I, 2023

Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas

Selome Muleta

Selome Muleta

Addis Ababa-based painter Selome Muleta (b. 1991) crafts rich internal worlds through the colour-laden interior scenes of her canvases, which frequently depict women in states of inner reflection.

The gestural, loose quality of her strokes, coupled with her sophisticated blending of pastels with vibrant shades of crimson and green, creates an atmosphere both quiet and complex. Selome employs translucent washes of hue to create a sense of contemplative unity between her subjects and their respective environments. At times, the faces of her characters are obscured or cropped, and the viewer is invited instead to focus on the sparse array of objects that decorate the room. A drooping plant, a dozing feline companion, a distant crooked framed portrait – the line between living and non-living objects becomes blurred, and the viewer is encouraged instead to focus on the sheer physicality of being.

Selome's works have been included in numerous solo and group presentations in London, Addis Ababa, and Kampala. Addis Fine Art will present a solo booth of her most recent paintings and works on paper at Liste Basel in June, 2024.

Nirit Takele

Nirit Takele (b. 1985) was born in Ethiopia, and immigrated to Israel in 1991 as part of 'Operation Solomon' an Israeli military operation that transported more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 36 hours. Although she grew up with very few memories of her childhood in Ethiopia, Nirit has been painting from a very young age practising her skills by studying the works of artists like Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Riviera, and David Hockney. In 2015, Takele graduated with honours from Shenkar College, receiving The Talia Sidi Prize.

Nirit is a bold colourist, building up faceted figurative bodies through the application of near abstract flat forms. With a sharp understanding of the power adjacent colours impart upon one another, her figures pop from the canvas, with vivid dimensionality. She explores her cultural heritage in her works, illustrating the everyday life of the Israeli Ethiopian community and finding inspiration in old Ethiopian sagas and folk tales remembered from her youth.

55⅛ x 43¼ in.

140 x 110 cm

Nirit Takele

Couple with Red Bracelet , 2023

Acrylic on canvas

Tesfaye Urgessa

Ich Halte Dich Fest Halten IV (I Hold You Tight IV), 2020 Oil on canvas

47¼ x 43¼ in.

120 x 110 cm

Tesfaye Urgessa

Tesfaye Urgessa (b. 1983) lives and works in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He studied under Tadesse Mesfin at the Addis Ababa University Alle School of Fine Art before enrolling at the Staatlichen Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart in 2009.

Urgessa's work is deeply rooted in his childhood and his memories as a young man in Ethiopia, and Ethiopian iconography is one of the foundational elements of his artistic practice. Over the course of his travels in Europe, the discovery of the heritage of German NeoExpressionism and the London School had a profound influence on his painterly style. Urgessa’s artistic subject matter focuses on social criticism, race, and the politics of identity.

Urgessa’s work has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions including Oltre/Beyond at Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy (2018); The Stand-Ins: Figurative Painting from the Collection, Zabludowicz Collection, London, England (2021); The New African Portraiture , Kunsthalle Krems, Krems, Austria (2022); Tesfaye Urgessa, Rubell Museum Miami, Miami, United States of America (2022); Tense Conditions: A Presentation of Contemporary African Art , Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany. Tesfaye Urgessa represents Ethiopia at the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, with a presentation curated by Lemn Sissay.

Addis Fine Art is a leading African contemporary art gallery with locations in London and Addis Ababa. The gallery was founded in 2016 by Rakeb Sile and Mesai Haileleul, with a focus on artists from Ethiopia, the Horn of Africa, and its diasporas. Since then, it has championed African artists on the international stage and established itself as a significant voice in the contemporary African art market. It has developed an international programme showcasing mid-career artists through its London gallery space, one of the city's few Black and African-owned art galleries. The gallery's Addis Ababa location has evolved into a regional incubator for undiscovered talent, exhibiting and developing the careers of emerging artists.

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