Wosene Worke Kosrof: WordScapes

Edward Cella Art & Architecture proudly presents new paintings by Wosene Worke Kosrof in his debut exhibition with the gallery, entitled WordScapes.

One of the major established artists of African heritage living in America; the Ethiopian-born artist Wosene has distinguished himself as being the first contemporary artist to use the script forms of his native Amharic language as a core element in his paintings and sculptures. This recognizable signature emerges from the way he elongates, distorts, dissects, and reassembles the characters of the fidäl (syllables) of Amharic, which evolved from the ancient liturgical script of Ge’ez.

Recalling that writing is the basis of civilization and is, in fact, embedded with social existence across space and time; Wosene seeks to engender new forms, histories, and intentions. Uninterested in the inscribing of literal words, Wosene creates abstract images that speak for themselves as a graphic language or visual poetry accessible to universal audiences. Painting from a place between mastery and uncertainty, Wosene’s improvisations underlie his compositions, animating them with rhythmic movements and emboldening his masterful use of color.

Now seventy, Wosene’s recollections of his mischievous childhood in the streets of Arat Kilo, a central district of Addis Ababa, inspire the creation of the work today. Recalling watching black and white Hollywood Westerns in the darkness of the city’s movie houses – their moving images and sound washing over him depicting unknown landscapes and people speaking in languages mysterious to him at the time – Wosene now creates paintings that often elicit or provoke synesthetic experiences of color, sound, feeling in the viewer. Untethered from the original linguistic, cultural, or national moorings of the syllabic characters of Amharic; Wosene recognized that these signs and patterns are ready-made abstractions and welcomes them arising in the creation of his paintings. In turn, Wosene presents us with a challenge to look into the art, feel its effect, and to watch what emerges through unique interactions. In alluding to these letter forms, Wosene unlocks a sense of infinite possibilities hidden within the alphabet.

A highlight of the exhibition is the painting Coming to Life (2020), which features a Dogon-like standing figure emerging from the cacophonous thatch of letters, graphic elements, paint/brush gestures, and colors. Carved figures such as these once served as channels of communication between the living and the spirits of their ancestors. Contained on three sides by open surface and contrasted with warm bright colors in tight patterns, the painting surprises the eye with a loosely filled distant horizon holding a bright sun-like globe hovering atop the dense field.

Another recent painting, Heart of Dance (2020), deploys numerous boldly articulated fidäl as an organizing grid across the canvas, the individual characters constructing blocks or spaces in themselves – each space its own microcosm. The black forms also simultaneously evoke the artist’s painterly gestures and figures in movement, in concert with one another, ecstatic in energy and life.

Representing Wosene’s first exhibition in Los Angeles since his participation in the 2009 exhibition at the Fowler Museum at UCLA entitled, Transformations: Recent Contemporary African Acquisitions, WordScapes presents a concise aperçu of the artist’s current painting practice including several works made during the quarantine. Attuned to political and social issues and conflicts of the past several years, Wosene has continued to pursue the potential of his chosen medium, to testify to the visual power and capacity of language to cross divisions, to surmount boundaries. His body of work, as he explains, is about the human condition, all facets of the human drama – about social justice, human rights, civility, and always the complex beauty of humanity. He states, “I create a visible, interactive surface – like visual icons that are accessible to everyone. My paintings invite viewers to dialogue with them, to take them into their memory.”

EXHIBITION PROGRAM

Join us for the gallery's first back-in-person event with Wosene Worke Kosrof, design tastemaker and collector Thomas Lavin, and gallerist Edward Cella for an informal overview of Wosene's newest paintings on Tuesday, October 28, 2021, from 3 to 5 PM. A reception with the Artist to follow.