Ermias Ekube | Artist Overview

I was born and grew up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where I studied at the Addis Ababa School of Fine arts and Design. Most of my works are figurative by appearance, essentially conceptual and evolving through thoughts and memories fermented from my experiences to form images that impregnates stories, stories coded with simple objects, signs, gestures and appearances. Some of them may be filled with emotions and some with thoughts, and some could provokes both. My desire is to explore the three-fold psychology of the human being—the individual, the social, and the universal, to capture my observations of different human conditions in our time. It is a compelling process to create a specific image via a specific medium using varied techniques, idioms, metaphors or paradoxes to reach at the final destiny of the image that may able to deliver multi-layered stories- for 'Stories are we are stories'. One can also observe my struggle to solve equations of some pictorial tensions and balances between form and content, technique and subject, expression and presentation, illustration and suggestion, figuration and abstraction, craft and concept, plane and color, and so on.