TIZTA BERHANU: SYNTHESIS OF SOULS
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Tizta Berhanu explores humanity’s full spectrum of emotions in her figurative paintings. Narratives of love, faith, kinship, and motherhood flow across her gestural compositions. Bathed in swathes of jewel-like primary colours, Tizta’s figures are painted with expressive brushstrokes, often woven into layers of the canvas’s abstract background. Interlaced in each other’s embrace, her figures express the beauty of human touch.
Tizta’s vivid colour harmonies echo the underlying emotions of each work. Oscillating between dense brushstrokes and translucent washes, her paintings ebb and flow in a subtle equilibrium of soft opacity and glowing vibrancy. Her works bathed in oceanic blues, such as Combination in Turquoise (2023), Emotional Focus (2022), and Dreamers (2022), evoke waves of nostalgia. Paintings rendered in warmer palettes such as Love (2023) and Sisters Love (2022) swirl with vivacious reds and oranges to conjure the overwhelming feeling of love: for family, friends, or God. Her luminous yellow paintings–Close to the Ground (2023), Confluence (2022) and Love Triangle (2023)–evoke the warmth of physical touch. Figures converge as souls in each work, revealing the infinite possibilities of love and empathy.
The artist’s deeply emotive paintings are inspired not only by her personal relationships, but also her memories and reveries. Her dreamlike paintings mirror the way memory works: recollections morph every time we revisit them and eventually fade into one another. Tizta’s painterly works are made up of layers of thin paint washes, capturing the nostalgic feeling evoked by fading memories and stacked recollections. Although we can never freeze a moment in time, Tizta gives permanence to the emotions of her memories on her canvases.
Spirituality is another central theme in this new body of work by Tizta, which encompasses a broader scope of emotional archetypes, such as faith, hope, mercy, and compassion. Despite the ongoing civil conflict in Ethiopia, the artist hopes her paintings can create a space in which people of various backgrounds, ethnicities or religions can contemplate the works in relation to their lived experiences and connect on a universal level. While dark clouds of war, tribulation, death and disease may try to overshadow brighter days, Tizta’s practice reminds us that faith, hope, and love can evolve out of our collective struggle with negative forces. Enveloping the viewer in moments of embrace, her paintings allude to the importance of community, an essential trait in Ethiopian culture–one that celebrates physical closeness, interdependence, and expressing support for loved ones. The artist’s work aims to remind us that we are all human, and we need to lean on each other to get through life’s highs and lows.
The language of love that threads through all of the artist’s work strikes a chord of particular poignancy in a world yearning for connectivity following prolonged isolation, increasing conflict and polarisation. Tizta invites the viewer into moments of tenderness and intimacy, making the emotions we crave tangible in her work. Instead of focusing on representations of specific people, her practice expresses the universality of human emotions. Limbs intertwine and extend into one another, so each figure has no beginning or end, and instead meld into each other to present the synthesis of souls.
Curated by Claudia Cheng
Addis Fine Art Gallery, London
27/04/23 – 27/05/23