Ficre Ghebreyesus (March 21, 1962 – April 4, 2012) was an Eritrean-American artist who made colorful paintings in a series of styles including representational, abstract, and a surreal combination of the two. His paintings show influences of European and American art as well as the culture and scenery of his native country. Many are small works; others as much as mural-sized. One critic saw his work as "dynamic, complicated and textually rich." The critic added that the paintings, "form at the nexus of culture, history and memory, sprawling across the canvas, and flowing out into this and other worlds." Ghebreyesus showed infrequently in commercial galleries and his work achieved widespread recognition only after its appearance in posthumous exhibitions.
Early life and training
Ghebreyesus was born on March 21, 1962, in Asmara, Eritrea. While still in his teens he joined the struggle for Eritrean independence. However, in 1978, at the urging of his family, he agreed to stop fighting and leave the country. For the next three years he moved among various Eritrean communities in Sudan, Italy, and Germany and then, in 1981, came to New York City where one of his sisters lived. He enrolled in Southern Connecticut State University and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2000. He also studied at the Art Students League in New York and attended Robert Blackburn's printmaking workshop. He won admittance to the Yale School of Art in 2000 and received a Master of Fine Arts degree two years later. On graduating, he received the Carol Schlosberg Prize for Excellence in Painting.
Career in art
Ghebreyesus rarely signed, dated, or gave his works titles and he did not energetically seek to exhibit them in commercial galleries. He worked in New York before joining two of his brothers in 1992 as co-owners of a restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut. He later said that he made his first paintings on the kitchen table of a tiny apartment in Manhattan. In 1991 he participated in a group show at the Cinque Gallery, a New York gallery that specialized in works by African-American artists, and later that year he received a Red Tag award in a group exhibition held at the Art Students League. After the restaurant was opened in 1992, he displayed his paintings on its walls. That year, he also showed paintings in the Ikenga Gallery, a New Haven gallery specializing in African arts, and received a talent scholarship for a year's study at the Art Students League. In the latter half of the 1990s, Ghebreyesus took a studio in the Erector Square building located in the Fair Haven section of New Haven. In 1995, he was given solo exhibitions at a nonprofit contemporary art gallery in New Haven called Artspace and in the offices of a book publisher in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, called Red Sea Press. While studying at Yale, Ghebreyesus showed in the school's first-year painting exhibition and its final-year thesis show and a few years after graduating he contributed paintings to a city-wide group exhibition held at various New Haven galleries.