New exhibition to open at LeLa gallery

A large collection of drawings and paintings by the artist Dereje Demissie will be on show in Addis Ababa this Saturday at LeLa Art gallery. The exhibition titled “Cycle” runs from 8 June, 3pm onwards until 23 June.
Graduated from the Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts, and exhibited in leading galleries in Ethiopia, Sudan, Dubai, Germany and Uganda, Dereje began to make an impact with his portraits and landscapes, rendered with high-keyed flickering colors.
LeLa Gallery art curator Leo Lefort said Dereje’s ‘Cycle’ exhibition offers an eloquent testimony of the need to develop the art of ‘seeing’ in depth the invisible realm. He said by emphasizing the expressive potential of natural formal elements, Dereje built a fine bridge between naturalistic painting and abstraction. The exhibition looks as if “ the observation of nature -mainly occurring in the South of Ethiopia, where Dereje often travels- led him to abandon all basic principles of reproduction, learnt with influential teacher Getahun Assefa, painting only with pictorial elements, not for the purpose of figuration but with the aim of a quasi mystical revelation,” said Leo.