Galerie Lelong & Co. at The Art Show 2020

Works on view include Ghebreyesus’s seminal painting Red Room (c. 2002-07), a vibrant still life that places him at the Yale University Art Gallery. The work directly references sculpture in the University’s collection, collapsing background into foreground, interior and exterior, to imbue it with as much life as the people it represents. While clearly inspired by his own life, the work also draws from art history, such as evoking the sensuous red color and patterned plant life that dominates Henri Matisse’s The Dessert: Harmony in Red (1908).

Ficre Ghebreyesus was born in Asmara, Eritrea, in 1962 during the Eritrean War of Independence. After leaving his homeland at the age of sixteen as a refugee from this decades-long political conflict, he traveled through Sudan, Italy, and Germany, before arriving in the U.S. While working as an activist for Eritrean independence, he studied painting at the Art Students League and printmaking at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York. He eventually settled in New Haven, CT, with his wife and two sons and was executive chef and co-owner with his brothers of the popular Caffé Adulis. In 2002, he received his MFA from Yale University and was awarded the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for Excellence in Painting at graduation. He died unexpectedly in 2012 at the age of fifty. While Ghebreyesus turned down most opportunities to show during his short lifetime, recent posthumous exhibitions of his work include Ficre Ghebreyesus: City with a River Running Through at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), San Francisco, California, 2018 and Ficre Ghebreyesus: Polychromasia at Artspace, New Haven, Connecticut, 2013. Lowery Stokes Sims, Co-Curator of his exhibition at MoAD and Curator Emerita for the Museum of Arts and Design, states, “Ghebreyesus’s paintings are infused with the urgency of cultural memory, national storytelling, and personal evocation.” Writer and poet Elizabeth Alexander’s widely lauded memoir, The Light of the World (2015), chronicles her husband Ghebreyesus’ life and work.