Tadias Magazine

Above: A Taste for Words by Wosene Worke Kosrof , 2008,
acrylic on canvas, 44×41 inches.

Events News

Published: Monday, October 19, 2009

New York – Skoto Gallery is pleased to present WordPlay, an exhibition of recent paintings by the Ethiopian-born artist Wosene Worke Kosrof. This will be his fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. The reception is on Thursday, October 22nd, 6-8pm and the artist will be present.

Wosene Worke Kosrof’s recent work continues his long-standing inventive exploration of the interplay between language, identity, aesthetic beauty and material, using the language symbols of Amharic – one of the few ancient written systems in Africa – as a core compositional element. He is a prolific artist who has consistently employed a vocabulary of signs and symbols, a rigorous compositional organization and uncompromising ability to fuse form and concept with the narrative power of his work in his encounters with history and global transformations over the past three decades. He elongates, distorts, disassembles and re-configures the language characters in a wide-ranging palette, moving beyond literal conventions of words, to create a visual language that deftly incorporates sounds, textures and rhythms of jazz, but that also speaks boldly and clearly to a universal audience.

Wosene’s work draws upon an individual reserve of personal and collective memories to activate a meaningful form of engagement that celebrates the richness of his homeland’s graphic systems, textiles, architectural forms, language and music. He employs the textured and improvisational qualities in his work, imbued with a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality in his search for symbols and metaphors that explore ideas of spirituality, space and motion, expanding the boundaries of art and consciousness. There is a resonance of personal truth, vision, circumstances and tradition embedded in his work that make us simply believe in the power of art to speak to us in purely human terms.

Wosene Kosrof

Wosene Worke Kosrof was born 1950 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and received a BFA from The School of Fine Art, Addis Ababa and a MFA from Howard University, Washington DC in 1980. He is an artist of international reputation, widely exhibited in Africa, Europe, Japan, the US and the Caribbean. Recent exhibitions include Transformations: Recent Contemporary African Art Acquisitions, Fowler Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 2009, Mexican Heritage Plaza Museum, San Jose, California 2006, Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY 2003; Newark Museum, Newark, NJ 2004; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pa 2004, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC 2004; and Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, Whitechapel Gallery, London 1995. Collections include the National Museum, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, The Newark Museum, NJ; The Neuberger Museum at Purchase, NY; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN, the Fowler Museum, UCLA, Ca; Samuel P. Harn Museum, University of Florida, Gainesville, Fl; and The Voelkerkunde Museum, Zurich, Switzerland as well as many international private and corporate collections.

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If you go:
Skoto Gallery
529 West 20th Street
5thFL
New York, NY 10011
Phone Number
212.352.8058
www.skotogallery.com