Artist: Ficre Ghebreyesus

Galerie Lelong, New York, presents Color is Supreme, an exhibition dedicated to the work of the late artist Ficre Ghebreyesus. Titled after an homage to the John Coltrane album A Love Supreme written by Ghebreyesus in his personal papers, the exhibition highlights Ghebreyesus’s deft handling of vibrant color in his often-abstract compositions.

Drawing from recent discoveries in the artist’s archive by his son Solomon Ghebreyesus, the exhibition presents a selection of photographs and ephemera to the public for the first time, revealing common subjects and compositions found across media. A polymath in the truest sense of the word, Ghebreyesus operated his family’s well-loved Eritrean restaurant in New Haven, excelled in painting at the Yale School of Art, and maintained a connection to the fight for Eritrean independence as an activist in New York, all the while cultivating a rich inner life across art history, the mastery of seven languages, and the development of new poetry, music, and recipes. Teasing out connections across Ghebreyesus’s art and life, Color is Supreme seeks to paint a holistic portrait of the artist.

In Ghebreyesus’s lyrical vision, color-blocking and geometric patterns combine to create a sense of energetic movement, much like the polyrhythms of his beloved Jazz. In a pair of early works, Ghebreyesus intersperses pockets of patterns and almost-recognizable objects with blocks of solid color to create an ebullient composition. This fluid abstraction blends with figuration in Hand Playing Guitar (2011), which illuminates the connection Ghebreyesus found between music and art. Here, Ghebreyesus paints swaths of color that form an abstracted guitar. His compositions hold invisible throughlines defined by subtle changes in color and strategic placing of figurative subjects, a technique rooted in his rigorous experimentation with geometry and the Fibonacci sequence, as revealed through his sketchbooks devoted to composition studies.

Riffing on the grid's significance in art history, Ghebreyesus uses checkerboards as a framework for his meditations on color, his variations in tone softening the rigid geometry of the form. A hallmark of his technique, Ghebreyesus paints crosshatched brushstrokes and carves patterns in acrylic to let an underpainted layer show through, adding a textural dimensionality to the work that rewards close looking.

A selection of photographs taken in the 1990s when Ghebreyesus returned to Eritrea to teach at a school in the warzone is also on view, marking the first time his work in this medium has been shown to the public. The colors and patterns in these photographs resonate with those in his paintings; Ghebreyesus further distills these scenes into a selection of accompanying pastels.

A cross-pollination of myriad interests defined the artist’s life and artistic practice, their consonance—the quiet harmony between disciplines—becomes clear in his notebooks. Alongside notes from his studies of art history, he sketches plans for an art school in Eritrea he dreams of opening, and his notes on Coltrane meld into ruminations on artmaking. The artist’s ceaseless synthesizing of information and innate curiosity resulted in a singular artistic vision; in Ghebreyesus's hands, memory, music, and image sustain a single, unbroken chord.