Nigatu Tsehay
b. 1981, Ethiopia
Nigatu Tsehay was born and raised in Addis Ababa Ethiopia. He was started learning Drawing and sketching by Artist Tesfaye Nigatu who was a private art teacher at the “Medesh art center” in Addis Ababa. He received a BFA from Ale school of fine arts and design Addis Ababa University in 2005. From 2005 until 2008 he teaches Art as Assistant lecturer in the same University. He received a scholarship from DAAD and later from KAAD for further study in Germany. In 2009 he recieved a recognition award from (Camillo-Michele-Gloria-Preis, GVS-Förderung Junge Künstler 2009). Nigatu completed a Diplom In fine art at the state academy of art and design Stuttgart in 2014.
For Nigatu Tsehay, art is a fundamentally interrogative process. While it may not always yield definitive answers, painting allows him to grapple with important questions and to employ his own visual language as a means of reflection and communication.
Rich with human form, Nigatu likens his canvases to a suddenly paused film scene – an instant in time bearing the weight of existence. His works are replete with distorted characters who frequently gaze in disparate directions, hands and feet punctuating a forested twist of limbs. An elegant sofa, a house plant, a tiled floor – these elements of the everyday become spliced and diced in an almost cubistic manner, and the contemporaneous portrayal of different perspectives invokes their participation in the passage of time.
It is through capturing these specific moments that Nigatu seeks to explore universal themes of existence and human experience, blending the precise with the abstract to create surrealistic realms which invite his audience to participate in the essential act of inquiry.