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What is home? What does it mean to belong? For Eritrea-born artist, activist and chef Ficre Ghebreyesus, who fled war in his homeland at the age of 16 and landed on US shores in 1981, these were vital questions that played out in his vibrant, often dreamlike canvases. “Painting was the miracle, the final act of defiance through which I exorcised the pain and reclaimed my sense of place, my moral compass, and my love for life,” the artist wrote in 2000, in his application for a masters in fine art at Yale School of Art.
Ghebreyesus, who died suddenly of a heart attack aged 50 in 2012, left behind more than 800 paintings. These were barely exhibited in his lifetime but have garnered acclaim posthumously, presented at the 2022 Venice Biennale and in a handful of US shows. Now Ghebreyesus will have his first solo European exhibition at Modern Art gallery in London, made up of 25 canvases from the 1990s to 2011, many of which have never been displayed publicly.
From vertiginous paintings brimming with pattern and colour to cubist-inflected figurative depictions to abstract geometric patchworks that might denote landscapes, the selection conveys his immense range of styles, sources and subject matter. According to the Ethiopian-American painter Julie Mehretu, Ghebreyesus managed to mine and invent “a visual language for displacement, of insistence, of affirmation despite loss, loneliness, mourning and grieving”.
Ghebreyesus was born to a well-respected family in the Eritrean capital Asmara in 1962, a year after the eruption of the 30-year war of independence from Ethiopia. Despite never living in the Horn of Africa country after his teens, his paintings draw on its rich convergence of influences: the Coptic Christian and Islamic iconography found in Asmara’s churches and mosques, prehistoric rock paintings, grand Italianate architecture from Eritrea’s colonial past and mural portraits of Marx, Lenin and Stalin painted during the brutal regime of Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam.
Ghebreyesus’s paintings hold in tension the joy of home life with his parents and five siblings and the horror of soldiers invading their compound and tanks in the streets. In 1978, after his school was shuttered by troops and Ghebreyesus tried to sign up for the Eritrean resistance, his mother packed him off with his cousin to travel on foot across the border into Sudan, then to Italy, Germany, finally arriving in the United States in 1981.
These experiences of upheaval and migration show up obliquely in his work. In a pastel work on paper from the 1990s, a luminous moon casts its glow over a barren mountainous scene with a lone tent and two figures huddled by a fire. Another work from the same period is an orange, purple and teal seascape of floating vessels, with what look like tropical flowers sprouting in their wake. Ghebreyesus’s widow, American poet Elizabeth Alexander, says he described such scenes as “dreamscape spaces of memory, flights of fantasy, but grounded in memory”.
Boats are a recurrent motif in his oeuvre along with gates, portals and angels. A painting from between 2002 and 2007 depicts sails camouflaged within a square patterning of blues and greens, recalling woven baskets, while another portrays two figures immersed in fluid within some kind of container, tenderly embracing or whispering. In Ghebreyesus’s work, boats have “a roundness, a human bodiness to them, that proper boats don’t have,” Alexander notes. “I think they represent passage from one space to the next, be it a country, be it a state of mind, be it a culture.”
On arrival in the US, the artist gravitated to New York and then New Haven, Connecticut, juggling several restaurant jobs at a time, studying and becoming involved in activism for Eritrean liberation. He studied painting at the Art Students’ League, a training ground for many abstract expressionists. In 1992 he and his two brothers opened the popular restaurant Caffe Adulis. It was there, while working as executive chef, that Ghebreyesus met Alexander, then a professor at the University of Chicago. They were engaged within a week and went on to have two children, Solomon and Simon.
From this time on his palette shifted from darker to lighter hues. “That sense of re-creating a very family-oriented wonderland was a deep safety and landing for him that I think allowed other things to come out,” Alexander says. Ghebreyesus was, she says, “a very, very passionate, ardent father”; photos show the children as babies happily lolling on his canvases.
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Only in 2008, after completing his MFA at Yale, where he won a painting prize, did Ghebreyesus stop cooking and devote himself to art full-time. He would spend many hours in the studio working simultaneously on several unstretched canvases of different sizes, always nourished by music: he loved Thelonious Monk and Ali Farka Touré.
Indeed, music fed into his paintings. It’s in Seated Musician II, painted around 2011, which gestures to cubism in its colourful geometric planes and fragmented depiction of the subject, whose disembodied, quizzical face floats above the rest of him as he plays the lyre-like k’rar.
And music is undeniably present in the enormous colourful burlap painting Map/Quilt (1999), which evokes the bursting rhythms of an improvised jazz composition. Jostling forms in coral, teal, mauve and orange, dotted with glyphs and symbols, stretch feverishly across every inch of the picture plane, dazzling the eye.
Ghebreyesus was reluctant to exhibit his work, driven by the desire simply to create, which seems somehow prescient in light of his untimely death. “He knew he had something to say and to share and to give,” says Alexander, whose 2015 biography of her husband, The Light of the World: A Memoir was nominated for a Pulitzer prize. The artist’s forthcoming London show is something of “a going home” in view of the number of Eritreans living in the capital, she says. His paintings connect to the yearning and lament of exile but also to the joy of reunion and the vitality of diaspora. Above all, they exude an extraordinary, inextinguishable life force.
