On view now: Ficre Ghebreyesus at ADAA The Art Show (Booth A8)

All works © the Estate of Ficre Ghebreyesus, courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co., New York. Photography © Joshua Nefsky.

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is pleased to newly represent the Estate of Ficre Ghebreyesus and will debut his work with a solo booth at The Art Show 2020. This will be the first time that Ghebreyesus’s work is publicly exhibited as a solo presentation in New York City.

Following this presentation, the gallery will hold a solo exhibition of his works opening on April 23, 2020. Concurrently, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), Ghebreyesus will be included in Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago from February 29 through May 10, 2020.

About the Artist

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. Writer and poet Elizabeth Alexander’s widely lauded memoir, The Light of the World (2015), chronicles her husband Ghebreyesus’s life and work.