Ficre Ghebreyesus: City with a River Running Through

The first museum showing and first west coast exhibition of the paintings of Eritrean-American artist Ficre Ghebreyesus (1962-2012), who fled conflict in his country and made his way to the United States as a political refugee. Ficre Ghebreyesus: City with a River Running Through brings together more than a dozen of his finest works, with a particular focus on Ghebreyesus’ abstractly rendered and vivid painted landscapes, replete with water imagery and aquatic life.

Visitors first encounter one of Ghebreyesus’ most impressive paintings, City with a River Running Through upon entering the exhibition. This massive painting, divided into four panels, is over 18 feet long and is a cartographical tour-de-force, depicting, from multiple perspectives, a cityscape made up of an abstract patchwork of colors, patterns, and shapes.

Many of the paintings on display are abstracts, studies of geometric color that highlight the artist’s delight in the material qualities of acrylic paint on canvas. Other works are more figurative, seeming to hint at dreamlike fables: a Coptic angel swims with a school of fish; a nude woman stands in front of a bottle tree while a Yoruba rider and horse look on; a young man reads a book as he walks into a tangle of corals and seaweed.

In all of these evocative, and often surreal, landscapes, the viewer senses a myriad of influences on Ghebreyesus’ work from the craft markets of Eritrea to the musical polyrhythms of the Black diaspora. This cultural layering speaks directly to the forces that shaped the artist’s life.  Between 1961 and 1991, the War of Independence raged in the Horn of Africa. Ghebreyesus was born in Asmara, Eritrea in 1962 right as this conflict began. In 1978, he left the country as a political refugee and lived in Sudan, Italy, and Germany before coming to the United States in 1981, working as a humanitarian activist on behalf of Eritrean independence and on-going relief issues. He returned to Eritrea in the 90s when the war had concluded, but remnants of the conflict could still be seen throughout the country.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Image: Ficre Ghebreyesus, City with a River Running Through, 2011 (detail). Acrylic on unstretched canvas. Courtesy of the Ficre Ghebreyesus Estate.

Whether or not you go, the exhibition catalog, Ficre Ghebreyesus: City with a River Running Through, showcases the work of Eritrean-born artist Ficre Ghebreyesus. Many of the paintings featured are abstracts, studies of geometric color that highlight the artist’s delight in the material qualities of oil paint on canvas. This collection brings together more than a dozen of Ghebreyesus’ finest works, focusing on abstractly rendered and vivid painted landscapes, replete with water imagery and aquatic life. In all of these evocative, and often surreal, landscapes, the viewer senses myriad influences, from the craft markets of Eritrea to the musical polyrhythms of the black diaspora, the cultural layering speaking directly to the forces that shaped the artist’s life.

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