Booth 84
We are thrilled to announce our debut participation at Liste Art Fair Basel, where we will be showcasing new works by Merikokeb Berhanu. This will be the artist's first solo exhibition since her inclusion in "Milk of Dreams", curated by Cecilia Alemani, at the Venice Biennale last year.
Merikokeb Berhanu’s (b. 1977) latest work reflects her preoccupation with the insidious hold of technology over contemporary society. While continual advances make daily life easier and more comfortable, humanity becomes ever more estranged from nature and our own emotional and physical well-being. Enraptured by technology, we value it more than people and the natural world: it is as though we have been cast out of paradise for eating the forbidden fruit and have lost touch with the purity of life.
A relatively recent transplant to the United States, Merikokeb was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Merikokeb’s emigration from Ethiopia in 2017 marked a time of sudden and intense change in all aspects of her life, a shift that is nowhere more evident than in her paintings. While Merikokeb’s work has always had a focus on lifeforms and biomorphic imagery, the pieces she produced in Addis prior to her move are distinctively earthy in tone, and at times feel almost as if they are materially imbued with soil and roots. However, upon finding herself for the first time in a Western consumerist society in the United States, Merikokeb became painstakingly aware of the insidious encroachment of the synthetic world and its threat to the environment. At this point, she started to gravitate towards the more vibrant, even fluorescent hues that define her latest paintings. New symbols - a circuit board structure, a cow with its udder turned ominously inward, the skeletal remains of fish - began to emerge throughout Merikokeb’s work as she grappled with the catastrophic implications of a society estranged from nature.
