Artist: Freya Tewelde

Gallery 1957 presents Geometry of Elsewhere, a solo exhibition by Freya Tewelde. The exhibition marks a new direction in Tewelde’s practice, bringing together a series of abstract paintings that move beyond figuration into layered explorations of rhythm, gesture, and emotional memory.

Born in Asmara and raised in Saudi Arabia, Tewelde draws on her diasporic experience and Eritrean heritage to explore ideas of in-betweenness, perception, and belonging. Working intuitively across layered applications of powder pigment, oil stick, and acrylic, her paintings unfold through repetition, movement, and mark-making, creating immersive surfaces that shift between energetic and meditative states. Beginning each work on the studio floor, gravity and gesture become central to her process, allowing each composition to evolve organically through layering and interruption.

Across Geometry of Elsewhere, abstraction becomes a language for navigating memory, interior space, and transformation. Through textured surfaces and rhythmic forms, Tewelde invites viewers into spaces that resist fixed meaning, instead holding a continual sense of becoming.

“Geometry of Elsewhere brings together a body of work I’ve been developing over time, shaped by lived experience and an interest in perception, memory, and interior space. Moving further into abstraction, the paintings unfold through gesture, rhythm, and layered mark-making, allowing the surface to remain open and in flux. I’m interested in creating a space that can be entered rather than read - one that holds a sense of becoming rather than resolution.”

- Freya Tewelde