Untitled LV

Firestorm Foundation acquired Untitled LV at the 2021 exhibition From Modern to Contemporary: Artists from the Horn of Africa and Diaspora (Scandinavia’s first major survey of artists from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, and the region’s diaspora) at CFHILL in Stockholm. The exhibition, featuring nineteen artists, was curated in close collaboration with Addis Fine Art, a pioneering gallery based in Addis Ababa and London. The gallery, founded in 2016 by Rakeb Sile and Mesai Haileleul, strives to promote artists from the Horn of Africa region and its diasporas by granting them local as well as international exposure.

One of these talented artists, promoted by Addis Fine Art, is the painter Merikokeb Berhanu. For 15 years, Berhanu painted in relative obscurity in the solitude of her studio in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, before being internationally recognised (and invited to exhibit her work at the prestigious 2022 Biennale in Venice, Italy). Working diligently throughout this period, she created a unique, transcendental visual language: abstraction, steeped in symbolism, incorporating elements of figuration.

Berhanu’s paintings appear abstract at first glance, but on closer inspection the forms take shape, revealing recognisable patterns from the natural world. The small circles – a recurring idiom in her compositions – represent the cellular structures that exist in all of us. Life-generating forms are also of particular interest to Berhanu. She often depicts the insides of a mother’s womb or a cow’s udder, the sources of sustenance for their young ones. Other frequently found symbols include the brain (as well as other internal organs), the bulge of a pregnant woman’s belly, and budding flowers.

In 2017, Berhanu moved to the USA, and her experience of living in a Western consumerist society ended up shifting her view of the world. Alongside her natural imagery, she now includes depictions of the encroaching synthetic world. The ravages of mass consumption are poignantly represented in her paintings as depleted rivers, their skeletal, amphibious occupants a testament to human activity. Her work speaks to her experience as a migrant assimilating into a culture unlike her own, which treats resources as unlimited, in stark contrast with the way they are viewed on the continent of her birth.

Berhanu’s colouristically well-balanced compositions, often simply referred to as Untitled (followed by a Roman numeral), combine figurative elements with purely non-figurative ones. This artistic method is evident in Untitled LV, where a pair of feet can be discerned at the bottom of the canvas, surrounded by colourful abstract elements. The feet naturally raise questions in the viewer’s mind, while this figurative element also provides a basis for a potential interpretation of the composition. Are we faced with an abstracted depiction of a human being, where the oblong and circular shapes are intended to illustrate a head and the (usually hidden from sight) underlying organs of the body? The painting can, of course, be interpreted in different ways depending on the viewer’s preferences and experiences, but it could be worth pointing out here that Berhanu’s work has often been described as dealing with ‘growth and decay in equal measure’, through the depiction of ‘an array of life-bearing forms’. In their presentation of the artist, Addis Fine Art wrote the following in 2019 (a mere two years before Berhanu painted Untitled LV):

Merikokeb Berhanu creates an aloof, almost subterranean atmosphere in her paintings. An array of life bearing forms, such as orange seed pods, embryos, fallopian tubes, and pulsing cells, appear set against a vibrant coloured background of predominately intense blues and greens, forming surreal yet earthly structures. Merikokeb makes much of the vertical ascent of saplings, plants bursting through the surface, as well as the forces that resist and suppress their efforts. Both growth and decay appear in equal measure: a flower climbs through a dense rock, if only to blossom and droop into the appreciative embrace of an exhausted and bonelike human figure. Her work at once appears to be a celebration of these life-bearing forms, as well as something more decidedly complex - in her words, “The life that we are passing through. The light, line, the complexity and density of what surrounds us, the thick fog and smoke, happiness and hope, misery and bliss.” She deeply communicates the visual equivalent of her feelings and thoughts, wanting the viewer to ‘hear’ the images through their own visual power.

Provenance

CFHILL, Stockholm, From Modern to Contemporary: Artists from the Horn of Africa and Diaspora, 11 June-17 August 2021.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired from the above).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation