MAGICAL: Ethiopian heritage fills his work
By Tom Patterson, Winston-Salem Journal, Sunday, April 1, 2007
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Wosene Worke Kosrof doesn't expect viewers in his adopted home country to understand the ancient African writing system that's central to his paintings. Nonetheless, he aims to make art that communicates with all viewers in one way or another.
"Words always have a special power for me," Wosene said during a recent appearance at the Guilford College Art Gallery, where 21 of his paintings (were) on view...
Wosene said he approaches each new painting without a plan. "I go into my studio with a lot of doubt," he said. "I don't know what I will paint. Everything is hot: the brushes, the colors, everything. I'm totally new with them every day."...
Each of his paintings begins as a raw canvas stapled to his studio wall. "My process is to continually challenge what I know," Wosene said. "I put my intuition right into the work that's in front of me. The process is very accidental. (But I'm mapping my experiences) and my mind is intensely working."
...While painting, Wosene said, he plays a role that he finds analogous to several other disciplines. He said that he moves quickly, like a dancer, and he builds his compositions in much the same way a construction worker would. "And I'm a mathematician in the way I code my colors and my spaces."
Wosene said that his relationship to a painting in progress is also akin to an argument. "We speak back and forth, and sometimes it makes me very angry and aggressive and emotional. Sometimes I have to go out of the studio, because the painting says we can't talk anymore. Then I come back later and say I'm sorry. I'm very persistent," he said. I go over a painting again and again sometimes before I finally take the liberty to say: 'This is done. I'll go on to the next one.'"
("Words: From Spoken to Seen: the Art of Wosene Worke Kosrof" was on view at Guilford College Gallery of Art from March 12 to May 4, 2007).
Copyright 2007, Winston-Salem Journal
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Ethiopian Uses Handwriting to Enhance Mix of Old World, New Influences
By Jack Fischer, San Jose Mercury News, May 19, 2006
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For a fascinating study of what ethnic identity can mean in a global age, visit "Words: From Spoken to Seen, The Art of Wosene Worke Kosrof" at La Galleria at the Mexican Heritage Plaza in San Jose, through June 30.
Just under a hundred years after Picasso borrowed imagery from African masks to develop modern Western painting, Wosene -- as the Ethopian-born-and-trained, now Berkeley-based artist prefers to be known -- has returned the compliment.
His wildly energetic canvases combine written letters of the ancient Amharic language of Ethiopia, and dazzling color from traditional Ethiopian Christian icon paintings, with elements of American-style gestural painting by such New York School artists as Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning.
The result is a style that suggests Wosene's passage through the contemporary world, an increasingly common cross-cultural journey as artists absorb the art of their native lands, then absorb ever more experiences from the rest of the planet.
Wosene, born in 1950, has been at it a long time, but I suspect the growing recognition he and artists from India, China and other non-Western nations are receiving is a harbinger. Work like Wosene's well may be the new face of international art as Western (and New York) hegemony over the art world recede in the face of globalism.
In this regard, the venue is for the show is pertinent. It signals that the Mexican Heritage Plaza's new president and CEO, Marcela Aviles, is construing the facility's mission to showcase multi-culturalism as broadly as possible, a recognition that the threads of individual ethnic identity don't exist in a vacuum, if they ever did.
Setting aside the work's larger significance, Wosene can be a gifted colorist whose canvas are filled with minute incidents, from the Ethiopian symbols and ornamentation to commercial logos and faintly figurative shapes, that together suggest an artist pouring his whole life into each canvas.
At age 17, he began studies in studio painting, drawing and design in the city of his birth at what is now the College of Art and Design of Addis Ababa University. I suspect he is the only artist currently working in the Bay Area to have received an award for excellence from the Emperor Haile Selassie.
Wosene and his work then traveled in ever widening circles, picking up influences as they went. Jazz by Duke Ellington and others joined classical Ethiopian music as important influences on Wosene's painting. He still speaks in terms of seeing sounds and hearing colors.
In 1978, after traveling and exhibiting broadly in Africa, he emigrated to New York, where he absorbed the same towering cityscape and headlong energy that had informed first generation Abstract Expressionists.
You can see the parallels between, say, de Kooning's "Excavations" from 1950 and such Wosene paintings as "Birth II" (1999), each with its syncopated black lines setting off carefully placed, small islands of color. Although the subjects of the two works are different -- de Kooning is interested in the "excavation" of form and Wosene with childbirth -- they teem with the same energy.
Wosene settled into the large Ethiopian ex-pat community in Washington, D.C., and began work toward an Master of Fine Art degree at Howard University. It was there that teachers encouraged his exploration of the Amharic characters that would become a signature element in his paintings.
After completing his MFA, he traveled frequently to New York, where he began an informal study of graffiti that blends with his use of the Ethiopian characters. Wosene's use of the characters always distorts them in a way that renders them almost but not quite readable, creating a space somewhere between reading and seeing.
At the Mexican Heritage Plaza, that technique, along with the further distorting influence of American graffiti can be seen most boldly in such works as the exhibit's title piece, "Words: From Spoken to Seen," created earlier this year.
The artist's combination of large, black graffiti-like marks in the foreground, combined with finer, colorful abstract shapes in the background reminiscent of Klee, give the painting an illusion of depth, as though we were looking out from a graffiti-scarred plate glass window to a cityscape beyond.
For most American audiences, the Amharic characters "read" only as decorative elements, although it is apparent they signify more. I only can imagine the additional resonance the paintings must have for those who know the language, like the difference between, say, hearing Edith Piaf sing and hearing her if you speak French.
The Heritage show -- curated by Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, an assistant professor of Art History at Stanford University, and Allyson Purpura, a visiting assistant professor of Museum Studies at George Washington University -- is a career retrospective, with 39 paintings that range over the past 24 years, from 1982 to today, although the majority are from the past six years.
The time span lets you consider the extent to which the work reflects ethnic identity and the extent of the artist's own more singular, idiosyncratic expression. There's a gradual evolution from the characters -- initially often presented on a traditional grid -- to work increasingly preoccupied with a looser, more improvisational modernist abstraction.
There also is an incongruity between the typically large size of the paintings and how close you need to be to really appreciate them. On close inspection, they are filled with discrete episodes, almost like a metaphor for a city or a country, teeming forms that bear relation to each other while still proclaiming their unique individuality and the artist's gift for colors. From a distance, they can dissolve into a frantic muddle.
For its implications of burgeoning globalism, you might call the Wosene show the first of the 21st century for the Mexican Heritage Plaza's gallery. Certainly it holds out the hope for a more vital presence at what has been a largely quiet venue.
Words: From Spoken to Seen
The Art of Wosene Worke Kosrof
Copyright 2006, San Jose Mercury News
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'Black' Comes in Many Shadings
Holland Cotter, Article excerpts from The New York Times, Weekend Section, Aug 13, 2004
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| Words of Memory |
"When the Studio Museum in Harlem introduced a group of young African-American artists in the show called 'Freestyle' a few years ago, the curator, Thelma Golden, called them post-black artists, and caused a ruckus. She was describing artists who didn't feel obliged to refer to ethnicity or racial history in their work or, if they did, were inclined to distance themselves from the references, put them in quotes - 'race,' 'power' - and so on.
Ms. Golden was making a suggestion, offering an opportunity, opening a door rather than closing one. But she hit a nerve and got a lot of people thinking about exactly what black art is and might be. Did blackness reside in subject matter? In style? Did the ethnic background of the artist justify, even require the use of the label, even if the art itself was, say, abstract? Other questions arose. In what way was African-American art African? And what does 'American' mean, anyway, in a country whose demographics are all over the world map? ...
... Despite its symbolic significance, the Christian art of Ethiopia has only recently gained attention in the United States, largely thanks to the 1993 exhibition 'African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia,' which appeared at the Schomburg Center in Harlem and later at the Walters. With its icon paintings, processional crosses and illuminated gospels, it is a wondrous art, a tight weave of Byzantine, Italian Renaissance and indigenous traditions that has a look and a spirit entirely its own.
More of this material is also on view this summer at the Newark Museum in 'Objects of Devotion: Traditional Art of Ethiopia.' This exquisite little gathering is meant to complement a second show, 'My Ethiopia: Recent Paintings by Wosene Worke Kosrof,' in which an Africa-America connection is updated and made concrete.
Organized by Christa Clarke, the museum's new curator of art for Africa, the Americas and the Pacific, it brings together 14 recent paintings by Wosene (as he refers to himself professionally). He was born in 1950, came to the United States in 1978 after Haile Selassie had been deposed, and is now an American citizen. He studied at Howard University in Washington with the influential American artist Jeff Donaldson, who died this year.
Like 'Rythm Mastr,' Wosene links African and American culture, but in a different way, by blending written letters from the Amharic language of Ethiopia with Western-style gestural painting. The results are abstract, but richly coded, with fractured texts, personal symbols (the shape of his childhood home in 'Words of Memory') and a palette of jewel-like colors - reds, yellows and greens - associated with Ethiopian icon paintings.
Is Wosene an African artist? An American artist? Modern? Postmodern? He is all of these. And however indirectly, his art is a reminder that African art may borrow elements of modern Western style, but in absolutely essential ways, Western modernist art originated in Africa. The link is forged yet again in the work of the young Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu, one of three participants in this year's artist-in-residence show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Dave McKenzie and William Villalongo are the others. All three were born in the 1970's; they are members - in excellent standing, I would say - of Ms. Golden's post-black generation..."
Copyright 2004, New York Times
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Spirit of Ethiopia Colors Artist's Paintings
Rona Marech, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, February 23, 2001
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Coffee reminds artist Wosene Kosrof of home. The bean was discovered in Ethiopia, and gathering each morning over small, steaming cups is an honored ceremony there.
And so it is in Wosene's Berkeley house -- geographically distant but spiritually close to the country where he grew up.
"There's a great deal of connection with me, my painting and my coffee," Wosene, 50, said recently over a whispering coffeepot. "It's sort of an instrument to connect me to home. It helps me open up the day. It is like sitting with a crowd of people. There is a cat there. There is a donkey there. I translate that into form and color and the feel of the human
condition."
For 30 years, Wosene -- who prefers to use only his first name -- has been translating time, place, memory and experience into intensely colorful paintings often likened to work by Paul Klee and described as complicated, exuberant or rhythmic. His abstract figurative works have been shown around the globe and collected by luminaries. For well over a decade, his paintings have commanded enviably high prices -- as much as $15,000.
But only now, Wosene's fans say, is he getting the kind of broad attention he deserves. In December, the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution acquired one of his paintings for the permanent collection. The purchase -- for five figures -- signals what some experts say is a long overdue shift.
For 50 years, museums have shown the same African artifacts, masks and carvings, said Patrice Mawhinney, manager of Spirits in Stone Galleries. Finally, they are beginning to wake up to contemporary African artists, like Wosene.
(Though Wosene's culture obviously influences his work, Wosene is unsettled by the "African artist" label, which he finds limiting. "People are always categorizing you based on where you came from," he said. "Why can't Wosene just be an artist?")
"The Color of Words," an exhibition of Wosene's most recent paintings opens tomorrow at the Sausalito branch of Spirits in Stone, the gallery that has represented Wosene for seven years.
Wosene continues to explore African imagery in his new works, including, most notably, his native Amharic, one of the few written African languages. He has been painting Amharic characters, often broken up or distorted, at least 20 years.
"I'm trying to find the individual beauty of this writing," he said. "The characters speak to me. I see them as broken glass, a piece of shoe, a stone, a plant. They're dancing in the space. . . . They speak to me. They speak out."
Many of Wosene's paintings are divided into irregular windows that recall African textiles or traditional Ethiopian magic scrolls. The juxtaposition of ancient and modern, poverty and capitalism is perhaps most explicitly articulated in the paintings that incorporate bits of Coca-Cola cans and credit cards.
"There's so much activity and animism, but when you gaze into the piece and be with it, the complex communication is revealed," said Laura Ponter, Spirits in Stone curator and also a collector of Wosene's work. "It looks busy when you stand back, but when you get into it, it is soft and subtle, like it's whispering to you."
Collector Paul McNab of Silicon Valley said he happened upon Wosene's work and was drawn to the spiritual nature of his paintings. He owns three of them. Another collector, a well-known scientist, once told Mawhinney, "This man paints the way I think."
Wosene first studied painting at the School of Fine Art in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. He moved to the United States in 1977 to study at Howard University and has been a citizen since 1990.
He settled in Berkeley seven years ago, drawn to the landscape, coffee shops and bookstores. Wosene's studio is a short walk from his house, and he works there eight or nine hours a day, five or six days a week.
"The more I go to the studio, the more I create a spiritual crowd," he said.
"It's like talking. . . . Sometimes it's almost like talking to a bird. What comes out is sometimes a memory. Sometimes it's almost like documenting the time of today and tomorrow. I let go of my mind to open up a new window every day."
Copyright 2001, San Francisco Chronicle
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