Tag Archives: Skoto Gallery

Events, Featured

Wosene Kosrof’s ‘Fidel Chewata’ Comes to New York

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Tadias Magazine
Events News

Published: Monday, May 14, 2012

New York (TADIAS) – An exhibition of recent paintings by the Ethiopian-born artist Wosene Kosrof will open at Skoto Gallery in New York this week. This will be Wosene’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery.

The show entitled Word: Future Tense is the a continuation of his Word Play series in which he combines written language and universal sounds anchored with an Amharic script. Wosene’s work is dense with visual complexity that celebrates text traditions from around the world. He forgets conventional meanings of words, and instead explores their aesthetic, sensual, and visual content to speak to a universal audience.

“The Ethiopian writing is one concept of exaggeration that I use in my paintings to express a global message that is political, cultural, and social,” he said in a recent interview with TADIAS. “I just returned from Japan, for example, where I had an exhibition and my intention is to show that we’re all connected.” He added: “If you look carefully you would notice that our music, jazz and other visual cultures are also embedded in my work.”

Wosene, who was raised in Ethiopia but has lived in the United States for over three decades, uses Amharic as a core compositional element. “I came to America during Jimmy Carter’s era,” he said. “That wasn’t that far back. It was only 30 years ago.” His work draws from his personal memories. “It’s really a Fidel Chewata,” Wosene said, referring to the Amharic translation of Word Play.

What inspires his paintings? “Movies, bookstores, photography, landscape, fashion, colors, conversations,” he said. “I am a loner so listening to jazz, sitting at cafes, watching street lights, people, car movements, all give continuous formation to my paintings.”

Wosene will be present at the opening reception on Thursday, May 17th, 6-8pm.
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If You Go:
SKOTO GALLERY
529 West 20th Street, 5FL.
New York, NY 10011
212-352 8058
info@skotogallery.com
www.skotogallery.com


Words: Future Tense, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 34×34 inches
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Related:
Wosene Kosrof’s Exhibition ‘Wordplay’ at Gallery of African Art in London (Video)

Art, Events, Featured

Skoto Gallery’s 20th Anniversary Exhibition

Tadias Magazine
Art Talk

Updated: Monday, January 23, 2012

New York (TADIAS) – In the heart of Chelsea, one of the centers of the New York art world, lays a gem for African art lovers. Skoto Gallery that opened in 1992 is one of the first contemporary African art galleries in the United States focusing on a mix of artists from the continent and the Diaspora.

Since its inaugural exhibition two decades ago – curated by jazz icon Ornet Coleman and held at its previous location in SoHo – the gallery has mounted memorable shows highlighting artists hailing from several African countries including Ethiopia, Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt, Cameroon, and Senegal.

In a recent press release Skoto Gallery announced that it is preparing to host its 20th Anniversary Exhibition this week featuring works by at least seventeen contemporary artists including Ethiopians Etiye Dimma Poulsen, Wosene Kosrof, and Tesfaye Tessema.

(Photo: Inaugural exhibition at Skoto Gallery, 1992)

“It is tempting to talk about Skoto Gallery as a secret treasure of the New York art scene; but doing so brings up a lot of contradictory data,” wrote poet and critic Geoffrey Jacques. “For instance, how does a “secret” survive two decades in a historically tough scene made even tougher by the cultural and economic head winds that have buffeted art, the New York art world, and the world in general in the last few years?” He added: “To say the quality of the work shown at Skoto Gallery during these last twenty years is responsible for its success would be one obvious truth. There is, however, more to it than that. Skoto Gallery performs a vital intervention into the very idea of contemporary art.”

In an interview with Tadias Magazine a few years ago, gallery owner Skoto Aghahowa stressed the importance of having a greater understanding of the creative process, the environment in which artists operate, as well as marketing and communication skills within the African artist community. “A piece of art work retains its value when one strikes a balance between scholarly work and commercial success,” Skoto said. “The most important work of an art dealer is to be familiar with the work of world artists, not just African artists, and to help create a context in which the work can be understood and appreciated.”

Geoffrey Jacques noted: “I remember being so moved by a 1995 exhibition of works by two sculptors that I had to write about them. The pairing was, at first glance, audacious: Tom Otterness, from Kansas, who lived in New York; and Bright Bimpong, from Ghana, who was, at the time, studying in New Jersey. It was the kind of beautiful exhibition we’re now used to seeing at Skoto Gallery.”
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If You Go:
Skoto Gallery
20th Anniversary Exhibition
January 26th – February 25 , 2012
Reception: Thursday, January 26th, 6-8pm
529 West 20th Street, 5thFL
New York, NY 10011
www.skotogallery.com

Art

Skoto Gallery exhibits Tesfaye Tessema December 9th – January 22nd

Above: New work by Tesfaye Tessema. (Symphony in Colors
I, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 42×30 inches) – Skoto Gallery, NY.

Tadias Magazine
Events News
Source: Skoto Gallery

Updated: Thursday, December 9, 2010

New York – Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Symphony in Colors, an exhibition of recent paintings by the Ethiopian-born artist Tesfaye Tessema. This will be his third solo show at the gallery. Reception is on Thursday, December 9th, 6-8pm, the artist will be present.

Tesfaye Tessema’s recent paintings exploits strategies that combine the physicality of paint, whether thin or thick, with an awareness of the role abstraction play as a means of expressing universal human emotions. He employs expressive gestures, deep sensitivity to texture and a mastery of tonality and color that gives his pictures a kind of interior glow where sight, memory and emotion fuse into a texture of vibrations and pulsations that allows the viewer a freedom of imagination, interpretation and emotional response. The question of where the inside and outside worlds meet, the ambiguity of space and surface tension are formally resolved in his pictures by an emphasis on concept and process over end-product while maintaining rigorous affirmative critical propositions about discrete cultural and historical realities.

In Tesfaye Tessema’s pictures, the filter of personal experience of doing, of painting and making art, away from his Ethiopian homeland for over three decades is not just essential to the substance of his creative process, but also bears witness to his ability to embrace a continuum of cultural precedents and influences, creativity with an open-ended improvisational sensibility and an awareness of the crucial links between culture, politics and social agency. The selection in this exhibition evokes the expansive possibilities of life and art in a world of changing realities and ceaseless change, and for an artist who has found a way to look forward, to engage the future and to challenge the present Tesfaye Tessema’s work is a testament to the ability of art to express big ideas about humanity.

Symphony in Colors I, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 42x30 inches

Tesfaye Tessema was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where he studied at the School of Fine Arts before leaving for the United States in the early 1970s. He obtained an MFA in Fine Art at Howard University, Washington DC, where he was exposed to the richness and diversity of the art of Africa, especially the classical art of West Africa where myth, metaphors and legend abound. His extensive travels in the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Mexico over the years have further broadened his perspectives on the commonality in socio-religious forms among various cultures. He has been included in numerous international survey including “Project Rolywholyobei – Circus from the Museum by John Cage”, 1994, Guggeinheim Museum, New York and Radford University Art Museum, Radford, Va, 2008. His work is in several public and private collections.

If You Go:
Symphony in Colors
Tesfaye Tessema, Recent Paintings
December 9th, 2010 – January 22nd, 2011
SKOTO GALLERY 529 West 20th Street, 5FL.
New York, NY 10011 212-352 8058
info@skotogallery.com www.skotogallery.com

Art, Events

New York Exhibition Of Recent Paintings By Wosene Kosrof

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Above: A Taste for Words by Wosene Worke Kosrof , 2008,
acrylic on canvas, 44×41 inches.

Events News

Published: Monday, October 19, 2009

New York – Skoto Gallery is pleased to present WordPlay, an exhibition of recent paintings by the Ethiopian-born artist Wosene Worke Kosrof. This will be his fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. The reception is on Thursday, October 22nd, 6-8pm and the artist will be present.

Wosene Worke Kosrof’s recent work continues his long-standing inventive 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. He is a prolific artist who has consistently employed a vocabulary of signs and symbols, a rigorous compositional organization and uncompromising ability to fuse form and concept with the narrative power of his work in his encounters with history and global transformations over the past three decades. 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, but that also speaks boldly and clearly to a universal audience.

Wosene’s work draws upon an individual reserve of personal and collective memories to activate a meaningful form of engagement that celebrates the richness of his homeland’s graphic systems, textiles, architectural forms, language and music. He employs the textured and improvisational qualities in his work, imbued with a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality in his search for symbols and metaphors that explore ideas of spirituality, space and motion, expanding the boundaries of art and consciousness. There is a resonance of personal truth, vision, circumstances and tradition embedded in his work that make us simply believe in the power of art to speak to us in purely human terms.


Wosene Kosrof

Wosene Worke Kosrof was born 1950 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and received a BFA from The School of Fine Art, Addis Ababa and a 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. Recent exhibitions include Transformations: Recent Contemporary African Art Acquisitions, Fowler Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 2009, Mexican Heritage Plaza Museum, San Jose, California 2006, Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY 2003; Newark Museum, Newark, NJ 2004; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pa 2004, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC 2004; and Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, Whitechapel Gallery, London 1995. Collections include the National Museum, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, The Newark Museum, NJ; The Neuberger Museum at Purchase, NY; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN, the 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.

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If you go:
Skoto Gallery
529 West 20th Street
5thFL
New York, NY 10011
Phone Number
212.352.8058
www.skotogallery.com