Biography
Ficre Ghebreyesus’s work is imbued with intricate, highly personal experiences as a citizen of the world. Born in Eritrea during the War of Independence (1961–1991), he left as a teenage refugee for Sudan, Italy, and Germany before settling in the United States, where he received an MFA from the Yale School of Art. Upon graduation, he was awarded the Carol Schlossberg Prize for Excellence in Painting.
A lifelong activist for Eritrean independence, Ghebreyesus practised music, studied painting and printmaking, and learned languages – he could speak seven. He made a living by working as the head chef of the famed Caffé Adulis, of which he was a co-owner, in New Haven.
Operating fluidly between abstraction and figuration, Ghebreyesus’s matte acrylic and oil paintings evoke the labyrinthine form of dreams, memories, and fables. His rebuke of borders and divisions seems distilled from his optimistic embrace of an identity and a home perpetually in flux.
While Ghebreyesus turned down most invitations to exhibit his work during his short life, his work has been shown in recent solo exhibitions at the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco) and at Artspace (New Haven). His work was included in “Recent Acquisitions” at the Yale University of Art Gallery (New Haven, 2022), having previously been shown at the Baltimore Museum of Art (Maryland) and at the Rollins Museum of Art (Winter Park, Florida).
Ghebreyesus’s oeuvre has also been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles. It is present in the collections of Baltimore Museum of Art; Glenstone Museum, Maryland; San Francisco MOMA; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Rollins Museum of Art, Florida; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Galerie Lelong began representing Ghebreyesus’s estate in 2019, and held, in 2020, a solo exhibition entitled “Ficre Ghebreyesus: Gate to the Blue”, in New York. The life and work of Ghebreyesus is chronicled in The Light of the World (2015), a memoir by his wife, the writer and poet Elizabeth Alexander.
