Artworks

Tariku Shiferaw
Adinkrahene, 2021
Acrylic on canvas
60 x 48 inches (152.4 x 121.9 cm)
(GL15114)


This new painting from Shiferaw reveals interplays of blacks and blues as he has experimented with throughout his practice. Evoking visions both severe and beautiful such as bruised skin and the sky, a celestial constellation emerges in the composition. The work comes from his new and ongoing series—Mata Semay (Amharic for “night skies”) which addresses the concept of mark-making and erasure using mythology as a way to take up space. The painting portrays a backdrop of the night sky with imagined constellations, while the foreground contains a symbol of an ancient West African culture, the Adinkra people. Other paintings in the series use symbols from diasporic cultures such as the Dogon people (modern-day Benin, Ghana, Nigeria), the Nubian, Cush, and Aksum people (modern-day Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia), the Aborigines, and many others.

Mythology is an important component of this series. Roland Barthes described mythology as a "phenomenon of mass culture," a semiological system which can transcend factual systems. Following Barthes’ interpretation, Shiferaw considers mythology to decisively affect the way we exist. It is a vital tool in shaping our imaginations and in forming interpretations of our reality. The artist finds mythology effective because of its invisibility—it infiltrates people’s perceptions clandestinely and subtly, shaping minds and behavior through mass cultural phenomena. Mata Semay is an imagining of what the night sky could be if Black people’s contributions—both past and future—were not erased from the global narrative. In this series, a variety of symbols representing the stories and myths of different groups of people from the diaspora are painted onto an imagined landscape of the night sky. Demarcating a place in the constellations and concurrently decolonizing and returning the “mata semay” back to all people. This simultaneously interrupts and subverts the West’s colonial impetus to occupy and appropriate space and culture.

Shiferaw is known for his practice of mark-making that explores the metaphysical ideas of painting and societal structures. This formal language of geometric abstraction is executed through densely layering material to create “marks,” gestures that interrogate space-making and reference the hierarchy of systems. As the artist explains, “A mark, as physical and present as cave-markings… reveals the thinker behind the gesture—an evidence of prior markings of ideas and self onto the space.” For Shiferaw, working in abstraction entails a re-envisioning of identity and form, the gestural surface in his paintings and mark-making is his reclamation of a space that was denied to many artists.

Museum exhibitions that have presented works by Shiferaw include the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; A Poet*hical Wager at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Ohio; Unbound at the Zuckerman Museum of Art (ZMA), Kennesaw, Georgia; Men of Change, a traveling exhibition organized by The Smithsonian Institution, and currently on view at the Anacostia Community Museum, Washington, DC and California African American Museum, Los Angeles; and What’s Love Got to Do with It? at The Drawing Center, New York, New York. Shiferaw has participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art (Studio), in Open Sessions at The Drawing Center, and he was artist-in-residence at the LES Studio Program in New York City. Shiferaw is currently an artist-in-residence at the World Trade Center through Silver Art Projects.

Shiferaw was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1983, raised in Los Angeles, California, and now lives and works in New York City.