Addis Fine Art announce that Merikokeb Berhanu has been invited to the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. (Main image: Merikokeb Berhanu. Courtesy of Dawn Whitmore.)
Addis Fine Art is pleased to announce that Merikokeb Berhanu has been invited to the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia
Curated by Cecilia Alemani, Berhanu will be Addis Fine Art’s first artist to ever be exhibited in the Biennale’s main pavilion.
The past year has seen Berhanu exhibit a sold out booth at Frieze London 2021 with Addis Fine Art, as well as garnering significant attention from acclaimed curators and institutions, including a recent acquisition by Instituto Inhotim Collection, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Berhanu has also exhibited with Addis Fine Art in The Armory Show (2020) and 1-54 Contemporary Art Fair (2019). She has also presented solo exhibitions in London, Addis Ababa, and Nairobi.
La Biennale di Venezia will open to the public from Saturday 23 April to Sunday 27 November 2022 at the Giardini and the Arsenale.
Merikokeb Berhanu was born in 1977 in Addis Ababa and graduated from the Addis Ababa University, Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in 2002. Berhanu currently lives and works in Maryland, but she spent the first fifteen years of her career painting in relative obscurity in her studio in Addis Ababa. During this fruitful period, she developed her own transcendental visual language where figuration meets abstraction, and rich symbols derived from the natural world are intertwined with ambiguous forms.
Following Merikokeb’s move to the United States in 2017, her subject matter shifted to incorporate depictions of the new, consumerist society she found herself in and its catastrophic impact on the environment. Meditated yet organic, her paintings are multitudinous in meaning – speaking at once to the experience of a migrant assimilating into a foreign culture, to the universality of life and nature which she explores through her depictions of animals and cell-like networks, and also stand as testament to her sophisticated understanding of colour and composition.
Images copyright the artist and Addis Fine Art
