The first national Ethiopian pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, housed in the elegant sixteenth-century Palazzo Bollani, may be challenging to find, but the effort is amply rewarded. In his solo exhibition Prejudice and Belonging, Ethiopian artist Tesfaye Urgessa presents figures that inhabit a broad and complex emotional spectrum where fragility and strength coexist. Ethiopian iconography and European modernist figurative painting converge, creating a striking visual dialect articulated throughout the ten large paintings and small portraits that fill the three interconnected rooms.
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