Tegene Kunbi Ethiopian , b. 1980

Tegene Kunbi completed a Painting and Art Education degree at the Fine Arts School at the University of Addis Abeba in 2004 and went on to teach at Kotebe College Academy. With the help of the prestigious DAAD scholarship, he left Ethiopia in 2008 to study at the Universität der Künste Berlin, where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts in 2011. He now works in Berlin and has been part of multiple group and solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad as well as collaborative international projects and workshops, for example in Paris, Casablanca, New York, Nairobi, Nouakchott, and Amsterdam.

Tegene is also the winner of the prestigious award Grand Prix Léopold Sédar Senghor at Dak’Art Biennale 2022.

"Colour is a vocabulary I use to give voice to aspects of my cultural heritage. Each hue is a conversation with the next, producing a sense of harmony and tension. Tonality, density and the rectilinear grid are also an integral part of the work. Through this language I convey the dynamism and complexities within my personal experience and that of my community. The underlying structure of the paintings repeats across a large body of work. This warp and weft is intrinsic to that of the Ethiopian textiles used in religious ceremonies that are at once inspiration source and more recently a material within the works. This aesthetic framework is reinforced and challenged all at once throughout the painting process which in itself is a ritual and also fight to reclaim a form of spirituality" says the artist.

Tegene creates compositions of different geometric shapes and colors, which express his personal vision of his native landscape, fabrics, clothes, and wall paintings. Oil and textile combine to create surfaces of vibrant textures and layers of color.

"A dominant feature in the work of the Ethiopian painter Tegene Kunbi is its use of strident and assertive colors. Whether this derives from Abyssinia and its long cultural and imperial history is less clear. The abstract vertical and horizontal stripes and blocks of color in Kunbi’s paintings nonetheless bear close affinities to the brilliant hues of Ethiopian heritage in Orthodox or Coptic manuscripts, murals and various patterned textiles. The artist’s free paint application, the use of rollers and brushes, the fraying of loose boundaries around the colored blocks with rough-edged overlays all this lends his work a tactile and discernible quality of handcrafted manufacture.

Less related to early abstract paint-chart structures of colored repetition and difference, they have a greater association with informal abstraction. A distinction remains in the way Kunbi lays in disparate colors directly on top of one another, in a manner reminiscent of abstract allover painting and palimpsests. The colors bleed through as if trying to emphasize the contradictory continuity of what is discontinuous - an idea further supported by titles that appear to have little relevance to the motifs at hand."

-Mark Gisborne