Press Release
Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Beyond Words, an exhibition of recent paintings by the Ethiopia-born artist Wosene Worke Kosrof. This will be his eighth solo exhibition at the gallery. The artist will be present at the reception on Thursday, February 12, 6-8pm.
Wosene Worke Kosrof’s recent work continues his long-standing exploration of the interplay between language, identity, aesthetic beauty and material using the language symbols of Amharic, one of the few ancient written systems in Africa as a core compositional element. His work is dense with visual complexity that reflects an awareness of a vast array of both formal and inherited traditions. He relieves words of conventional meanings and, instead, explores their aesthetic, sensual, and visual content to speak boldly and clearly to a universal audience. With Amharic calligraphy, Wosene explores the aesthetic dimensions of the script rather than producing legible text. “I am seeking the poetic or artistic value of the “fiedel” or language symbols themselves, and I see my work as visual poetry. The writings in my painting do not tell a literal story, but rather a visual story. The Amharic “fiedel” are extremely beautiful and have rhythmic and dancing forms. I “choreograph” them on canvas, I cut them apart, turn them upside down, repeat sections of them to discover the beauty of written language and to think about how we communicate. I communicate with color, line and composition, rather than with sounds, conventional words and literal narratives”.
Wosene (his professional name) was born 1950 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and received a BFA from The School of Fine Art, Addis Ababa and an MFA from Howard University, Washington DC in 1980. He is an artist of international reputation, widely exhibited in Africa, Europe, Japan, the US and the Caribbean. Selected museum exhibitions include: Keith Haring Museum of Japan, Kobuchizawa, Japan, 2017; Sharjah Museum Calligraphy Biennial, UAE, 2014; Transformations: Recent Contemporary African Art Acquisitions, Fowler Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 2009; Newark Museum, Newark, NJ 2004; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC 2004; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; and Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, Whitechapel Gallery, London 1995.
Collections include the National Museum of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa; The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; The Neuberger Museum at Purchase, NY; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN; Keith Haring Museum of Japan, Kobuchizawa; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Fowler Museum, UCLA, CA; Samuel P. Harn Museum, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL; and The Voelkerkunde Museum, Zurich, Switzerland as well as many international 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 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.
Daniel Dawson
Independent Curator
New York City
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.
Senior Curator and Curator of Global African Arts
Krannert Art Museum
University of Illinois, Champaign, IL
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
Department of Art History
Indiana University Bloomington
Bloomington, IN
*Culled from catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition “Words: From Spoken to Seen: The Art of Wosene Worke Kosrof. Foreward by C. Daniel Dawson; Curated by art historians Allyson Purpura and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, Mexican Heritage Plaza; San Jose, CA, April 12-June 30, 2006
