Tizta Berhanu – Synthesis of Souls

Tizta Berhanu

Tizta Berhanu

Synthesis of Souls

27 April – 27 May 2023

Tizta Berhanu Synthesis of Souls

Claudia Cheng, guest curator

Tizta Berhanu explores humanity’s full spectrum of emotions in her figurative paintings. Narratives of love, faith, kinship, and motherhood flow across her gestural compositions. Bathed in swathes of jewel-like primary colours, Tizta’s figures are painted with expressive brushstrokes, often woven into layers of the canvas’s abstract background. Interlaced in each other’s embrace, her figures express the beauty of human touch.

Tizta’s vivid colour harmonies echo the underlying emotions of each work. Oscillating between dense brushstrokes and translucent washes, her paintings ebb and flow in a subtle equilibrium of soft opacity and glowing vibrancy. Her works bathed in oceanic blues, such as Combination in Turquoise (2023), Emotional Focus (2022), and Dreamers (2022), evoke waves of nostalgia. Paintings rendered in warmer palettes such as Love (2023) and Sisters Love (2022) swirl with vivacious reds and oranges to conjure the overwhelming feeling of love: for family, friends, or God. Her luminous yellow paintings – Close to the Ground (2023), Confluence (2022) and Love Triangle (2023) – evoke the warmth of physical touch. Figures converge as souls in each work, revealing the infinite possibilities of love and empathy.

The artist’s deeply emotive paintings are inspired not only by her personal relationships, but also her memories and reveries. Her dreamlike paintings mirror the way memory works: recollections morph every time we revisit them and eventually fade into one another. Tizta’s painterly works are made up of layers of thin

paint washes, capturing the nostalgic feeling evoked by fading memories and stacked recollections. Although we can never freeze a moment in time, Tizta gives permanence to the emotions of her memories on her canvases.

Spirituality is another central theme in this new body of work by Tizta, which encompasses a broader scope of emotional archetypes, such as faith, hope, mercy, and compassion. Despite the ongoing civil conflict in Ethiopia, the artist hopes her paintings can create a space in which people of various backgrounds, ethnicities or religions can contemplate the works in relation to their lived experiences and connect on a universal level. While dark clouds of war, tribulation, death and disease may try to overshadow brighter days, Tizta’s practice reminds us that faith, hope, and love can evolve out of our collective struggle with negative forces. Enveloping the viewer in moments of embrace, her paintings allude to the importance of community, an essential trait in Ethiopian culture–one that celebrates physical closeness, interdependence, and expressing support for loved ones. The artist’s work aims to remind us that we are all human, and we need to lean on each other to get through life’s highs and lows.

The language of love that threads through all of the artist’s work strikes a chord of particular poignancy in a world yearning for connectivity following prolonged isolation, increasing conflict and polarisation. Tizta invites the viewer into moments of tenderness and intimacy, making the emotions we crave tangible in her work. Instead of focusing on representations of specific people, her practice expresses the universality of human emotions. Limbs intertwine and extend into one another, so each figure has no beginning or end, and instead meld into each other to present the synthesis of souls.

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1991, Tizta has lived and worked there her entire life. She developed her passion for painting and drawing at an early age, recalling using nature as her canvas and creating shapes with mud as a child. Tizta went on to study art at the Enlightenment Art Academy, and obtained her BFA at Alle School of Fine Art and Design, Addis Ababa University, where she was taught by influential Ethiopian modernist figurative painters such as Tadesse Mesfin.

Sisters Love , 2022

Oil on canvas

140 × 140 cm

Close to the Ground , 2023

Oil on canvas

140 × 150 cm

Combination

in Turquoise , 2022

Oil and acrylic on canvas

160 × 200 cm

Two in Harmony , 2023

Oil and acrylic on canvas

140 × 140 cm

Love Triangle , 2023

Oil on canvas

110 × 110 cm

In 2016, Rakeb Sile and Mesai Haileleul co-founded Addis Fine Art, creating the first white-cube gallery space for modern and contemporary art in Ethiopia. Described as one of the “Most Important Young Galleries in the World” (Artsy 2019), the gallery has since then grown to become one of the leading galleries in Africa, establishing a prominent international platform for artists from the Horn of Africa.

In October 2021, Addis Fine Art London moved into expanded premises in Eastcastle Street, opening a two-storey gallery space in the heart of Fitzrovia. The London gallery programme will encapsulate Addis Fine Art’s commitment to heightened international exposure for, and critical reappraisal of, African art on the world stage. The gallery’s Addis Ababa space will continue to be an incubator for emerging talent, facilitating critical engagement within the local market and encouraging the growth and development of the artworld ecosystem on the continent. The gallery will also serve as a space for artists from the diaspora to return to the continent and share and develop their practice.

Published by Addis Fine Art on the occasion of Tizta Berhanu

27 April – 27 May 2023

Addis Fine Art

21 Eastcastle Street

London W1W 8DD

© 2023 Addis Fine Art

Credits:

All images © 2023 Tizta Berhanu

Text © 2023 Claudia Cheng, guest curator

Photography by Lucy Emms

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Addis Fine Art

Designed by Lucy Harbut

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