Press Release
TRANS/FORMS
Recent Paintings
Wosene Worke Kosrof
October 19th – November 25th, 2006
Skoto Gallery is pleased to present TRANS/FORMS, an exhibition of recent paintings by the Ethiopian-born artist Wosene Worke Kosrof. This will be his third solo exhibition at the gallery and the reception is Thursday, October 19th, 5-8pm. The artist will be present.
Wosene continues his current series Words: From Spoken to Seen with his inventive use of the language symbols of Amharic – a major modern language of Ethiopia – as a core compositional element in his work. He is a leading artist of his generation, with an active practice and since the late 1970s, a strong commitment to the written word first and foremost as an aesthetic strategy. He elongates, distorts, disassembles and re-configures the language characters in a wide-ranging palette: moving beyond literal conventions of words, to create a visual language that deftly incorporates sounds, textures and rhythms of jazz. There is a resonance of personal truth, vision, circumstances, and tradition embedded in this body of work that make us simply believe in the power of art to speak to us in purely human terms.
Wosene was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; completed his BFA at the Addis Ababa School of Fine Art, then an MFA at Howard University College of Fine Art in 1980. He is an artist of international reputation, widely exhibited in Africa, Europe, Japan, the US and the Caribbean. Recent exhibitions include Mexican Heritage Plaza Museum, San Jose, California in 2006, Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY 2003; Newark Museum, Newark, NJ 2004 and Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC in 2003. Upcoming exhibitions include ‘Inscribing Meaning: African Arts of Writing and Inscription at National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution (travel to Fowler Museum , UCLA, Los Angeles) and a solo show at Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL IN 2007. Collections include The Newark Museum, NJ; The Neuberger Museum at Purchase, NY; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; The National Museum, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN, the Voelkerkunde Museum, Zurich, Switzerland as well as many private and corporate collections.
Three Perspectives on the Art of Wosene
In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, ecologist and philosopher David Abram has suggested that all languages and alphabets arise out of specific physical landscapes, but they can also become an unconscious replacement for that landscape. For Abram, language and writing can become a veil between us and the sensual or natural world, replacing our direct contact with that world with a text. We then live vicariously through our written language and have lost contact with a great living mystery, or in Abram’s words, the “spell of the sensuous.” Using the Amharic alphabet and written language as his foundation, Wosene takes us on the return journey of making the script/word/letter become landscape again, not its replacement.
(When I refer) to Wosene as an artist/scribe, I mean ‘scribe’ in the deepest Pharaonic Egyptian sense of the keeper of the wisdom of the world. Wosene has done more than a modern deconstruction of the box that language has been put in. He is returning us to another way of understanding the mystery, magic, and power of language, the oldest way of philosophizing about language. In the ancient view each letter was magical, each letter had a power, each letter constructed something and could stand on its own, or it could join together with other letters/symbols and could create something else, something of power, grace, and beauty.
Wosene is playing with powerful forces, but most of all he is not playing at all. Although there is humor in his work and at times a joyful juxtaposition of signs and symbols, his intentions are serious. Wosene is concerned with…the expansion of the boundaries of art and consciousness.
C. Daniel Dawson
Independent Curator
New York City, 2006
Exploring the temporal and spatial dimensions of script has led Wosene to experiment with its deployment in constructions of place and identity. In his art, Amharic becomes an elastic means for communicating across the limits of time, place, and culture.
While Wosene’s Ethiopian descent informs his practice in significant ways, it does not define him or his art as essentially ‘African’ or ‘Ethiopian’. The tendency to see the work of non-Western contemporary artists as representative of the artist’s culture of origin not only limits the narrative possibilities of the work; it also locks the artist out of time and place, reducing him, his agency, his very history, to a stereotype that privileges tradition over modernity, the local over the global, and permanence over transience.
If anything, it is precisely because Wosene’s work is loosely biographical that it cannot be reduced to any one place, impulse, or time. Having lived outside Ethiopia since the late 1970s, the artist draws from all the places he has called home, and as such, he resists fixed and facile labels of identity.
Allyson Purpura, Ph.D.
Independent Curator
University of Michigan Museum of Art
Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2006
Wosene’s use of Amharic…breaks from the traditional use of writing as mere verbal support in iconic paintings, scrolls or seals. In Wosene’s work, the language itself becomes the subject matter and each letter can evoke reverence for a culture in those that read the canvas. They contain and convey expanding realms of possibilities and make possible relationships between diverse forms and senses, bringing together smell, flavor, music, gesture, and art itself.
In their de-fragmentation, Wosene’s paintings are ultimately sensory experiences. They contain texture and surfaces that turn their viewing into a tactile experience of sorts for the eyes. Not satisfied with merely providing the viewer with something to look at, Wosene’s work demands engagement, drawing one into the experience of the painting itself. His use of space, motion, and the constant splitting, replicating, and mutating of his fractal designs necessarily involves one’s sense of balance and direction, while the explosions of color and angles engender a visceral reaction to something akin to sound and flavor.
Bárbaro Mártinez-Ruíz, Ph.D.
Artist/Art Historian, African Arts
Stanford University
Palo Alto, California, 2006
