Maitre Artiste Afewerk Tekle dies at 80
http://www.ethiopian-news.com/maitre-artiste-afewerk-tekle-dies-at-80/
Ethiopian renowned painter, the Most Honorable Maitre
Artiste World Laureate Afewerk Tekle has died in Addis Ababa on Tuesday at the age of 80.
The late Afewerk died
while he was being treated in a hospital here in the capital Addis Ababa due to a severe illness.
The late Afewerk was born on 22 October 1932 in the town of Ankober from his mother
Weyzero Felekech Yematawerk and his father Ato Tekle Mano.
Afewerk joined the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London after sent to England
in 1947 to become a mining engineer and later he went to the Faculty of Fine
Arts of the University
of London, the famous
“Slade”.
After he completed his studies he returned to Addis Ababa where he held a one-man exhibition at the
Municipality Hall in 1954, which was the first significant art exhibition of
post-war Ethiopia,
according to the painter’s official portal.
Soon after the exhibition, he left Ethiopia for a study tour in Italy, France,
Spain, Portugal and Greece.
He also made a special study of the Ethiopian illustrated
manuscripts in the British Library, the Bibliothẻque Nationale in Paris and the
Vatican Library, thereby gaining a deeper knowledge of his own artistic
heritage.
After returning to Ethiopia, Afewerk opened his studio
in the National Library of Ethiopia.
Soon afterwards he was assigned by the Ethiopian Government
to decorate St. George’s
Cathedral, one of the capital’s important religious edifices, where he worked
on murals and mosaics for three and a half years.
Though his interest in sculpture was second only to that in
painting, Afewerk had produced the equestrian stature of Ras Makonnen of
Harrar.
After 1959 his reputation grew within the country and
internationally as his mastery over so many media was established.
His drawings, paintings, murals, mosaics, stained-glass
windows and sculptures, his designs for stamps, playing cards, posters, flags
and national ceremonial dresses, all went to build up his position as Ethiopia’s
foremost artist.
The playing cards were of particular interest in that they
embodied a series of little-known Ethiopian motifs, some of them dating back to
pre-Christian times and thus introduced Ethiopia’s artistic heritage to the
card-playing public.
Afewerk also designed his own house, studio and gallery,
known as Villa “Alpha”.
The artist’s complex of buildings was conceived as a whole
in 1959, but was realized in stages over a period of fifteen years, as a third
of the proceeds of every exhibition abroad was devoted to the construction of
the work.
His 1961 retrospective exhibition in Addis Ababa was a major landmark in the
country’s artistic life.
One of the paintings exhibited is the well-known Maskal
Flower which made its debut on this occasion, and has since been exhibited in
the USSR, the USA, and at the Festival of Negro Arts in 1965
at Dakar, Senegal.
His paintings such as “Backbones of African Civilization”
“African Movement”, “African Atmosphere” and “African Unity”, and for Expo 67
in Montreal, Canada, “Africa’s Heritage” which in now in the permanent
collection of the National Museum of Ethiopia.
He also produced over ten designs for an African Unity
emblem and flag.
Afewerk’s internationally famous stained-glass windows
confronting the visitor in the entrance of Africa Hall, the United Nations
Economic Commission for Africa, is one of his greatest achievements; it shows
his mastery on a gigantic scale (150sq.m.) of a medium which has inspired
artists ever since the Middle Ages, and it embodies in its three panels
Africa’s sorrowful past, present struggle, and its high aspirations for the
future.
In 1964 he became the first winner of the Haile Sellassie I
Prize for Fine Arts for his outstanding drawings, paintings, landscapes, and
portraits which eloquently express his particular world environment, and for
his contribution in being among the first to introduce contemporary techniques
to Ethiopian subject matter and content.
The award for the Order of “Hero of Peace of Friendship”
from U.S.S.R in 1980, American Academy Membership Award, Cambridge Life time
Achievement Award and membership in 1992 as well as the International Peace
Prize Award in 2004 are among the awards he received.
ETHIOPIAN MAGIC SCROLLS: Talismanic Art of Ethiopia
http://www.ethiopian-news.com/ethiopian-magic-scrolls-talismanic-art-ethiopia/
In 2005 the London dealer Sam
Fogg blew us away with an exhibition of Ethiopian Christian liturgical art:
open-work processional crosses cast in metal or carved from wood, along with
brilliantly painted icons and illuminated Gospels, some made centuries ago in
the great court ateliers of post-Byzantine Africa.
Now Mr. Fogg, in association with Milos Simovic of Elizabeth
Street Fine Arts, follows up with a smaller show of 18th- and 19th-century
objects that emerged from Ethiopian popular religion. And they are equally, if
differently, wondrous.
Magic or healing scrolls usually take the form of long,
narrow, often segmented vertical strips of parchment covered with handwritten
texts — protective prayers, spell-casting formulas — interspersed with drawn
and painted images. Such scrolls were, and still are, created by traditional
healers and diviners. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has always viewed the art
with deep suspicion, in part because it mixes canonically sacred and heterodox
elements: figures of warrior-saints and archangels rub shoulders with uncouth
demons; talismanic designs derived in part from Islamic, Judaic and
pre-Christian folk sources mingle with New Testament quotations.
But whatever their religious status, these scrolls are
visual knockouts. One of the oldest in the show, dating to the late-18th or
early-19th century, is punctuated by the image of an eight-pointed star, known
as Solomon’s Seal, with a pair of starting eyes at its center and other eyes
jutting from the sides like wings.
Eyes, meant to spot evil and stare it down, abound in this
art, in abstract patterns but also in the faces of angels and devils whose
identities can be hard to tell apart. A fantastic creature with a Tweety-bird
head and tiny birdlike beak could be either celestial or hellish, as could a
dark-skinned presence of ethereal grace who bares a set of ferociously sharp
teeth. In certain cases the affiliation is unmistakable. That being in the
head-to-toe coat of puffy rainbow clouds? Divine, obviously.
What is clear in every detail of these objects is a
believed-in vivacity. They were created to generate live spiritual power in the
material world, which is why the devotees carried them everywhere during the
day and hung them unfurled on the walls of their homes at night. Like computers
in sleep mode, scrolls were always on, ready to power-up into action.
And they translate easily into a Western context. The art
historian Jacques Mercier has compared the dynamic of healing scrolls to the
work of Western painters like James Ensor and Adolf Wolfli, for whom art had a
deeply personal, psychologically ameliorating dimension. In the art of
contemporary Ethiopian artists like Gedewon Makonnen (1939-95), scroll imagery
blurs the boundary between traditional function and modern abstraction.
Although the Metropolitan Museum of Art has in recent years
been putting together a significant collection of Ethiopian religious art,
magic scrolls, so far, don’t seem to play a large role in it. This makes the Elizabeth Street
exhibition — installed, rather startlingly, in the rear section of a gallery
otherwise specializing in, among other things, Coney
Island artifacts — one of the few opportunities anywhere to see
this extraordinary art. While you’re there, don’t miss the accompanying display
of processional crosses. Fabulous.