Ficre Ghebreyesus

Modern Art (London) 14 Mar/10 May 2025

When the viewer first enters the exhibition of works by Ficre Ghebreyesus (1962-2012) at Modern Art in London, his first show in the United Kingdom, they encounter a diverse collection of work, with sixteen paintings of different sizes and formal approaches, which somehow appear to form a coherent whole. In ‘Map / Quilt’ (1999), the largest work in the exhibition, Ghebreyesus evokes the patterns and colours of Eritrean textiles by means of a dense network of lines and shapes, suggesting a map that is not just a guide to topography, but also a metaphorical patchwork of memories, routes, and imagined returns. As his wife – the poet and literary scholar, Elizabeth Alexander – explains, his paintings are memories of the compound from the family home where he grew up, memories of food, music, colour, baskets, and fabrics.

Ghebreyesus emigrated to the US as a teenager, following the outbreak of civil war in Eritrea, in which his brother was killed. After making a career as head chef at Caffé Adulis in New Haven, a restaurant that he co-founded with his brothers, he started to focus on painting, using his work as a means of reckoning with the home and life he had left behind. He rarely exhibited his work while he was alive, choosing to keep his paintings private. After his early death in 2012, aged 50, his archive of more than 700 paintings began to leave his studio for the first time. His work has since been shown at major institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and acquired by collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

There is a remarkable formal variety in his practice, as he switches fluidly between recognisable figuration and complete abstraction, and between landscape and portraiture, as he pieced the fragments of his life together. In one work he makes profile figures of men, painted in flat brushstrokes with diluted paint and uniform texture, their slight transparency preserving the immediacy and simplicity of the act. In another work, these figures dissolve into geometric shapes or become so densely packed that they are lost among themselves. In ‘Untitled with Sea Urchin’ (c. 2002), an agglomeration of objects, furniture, patterns, silhouettes, writing, and doodles fills the entire surface: these are part early memories, part observed phenomenon, part artistic inventions.

Ghebreyesus’s exhibition leaves the viewer delighted but also a little disorientated. The work is unusual, and resists simple or immediate readings, but it is magical too. It subverts our expectations of a solo exhibition, where a unitary intention and style is generally assumed. Among the paintings on show there is ambiguity and variety, but there is also a quiet logic that unfolds visually through the colours, shapes, images, and writing marks. When, more than a century ago, Picasso and Braque experimented with a style of painting that came to be known as Cubism, they used techniques of fragmentation and distortion to present multiple realities of space and time within a single visual plane. This transformational moment in art history might serve as a helpful point of reference for looking at Ghebreyesus’s enchanting work.

As with a beautifully cooked meal, the aftertaste is rich, warm, and celebratory. These generous paintings are about learning how to live a beautiful life.

Ana Teles for London Art Walk
April 2025