Untitled 

Curator: What I immediately feel is drama, a landscape on the verge of something. Is it a storm? A revelation? It's incredibly moody. Editor: I see that. And in this "Untitled" oil painting by Gebre Kristos Desta, we certainly find an Ethiopian modernism alive with expressive energy, even in a landscape. What we are witnessing here is not just a landscape painting, but something of an encounter. Desta left Ethiopia to embrace the international art scene. Curator: Encounter is such a perfect word! There's this wild tension between representation and abstraction. The sky, particularly, feels like pure feeling. Those strokes—electric, almost. I imagine him, brush in hand, battling the canvas, not just describing what he sees, but wrestling with it. Editor: You’re keying into Desta’s embrace of expressionism—we see echoes of Fauvism too. The raw color isn’t simply descriptive. It’s as if he is taking cues from his predecessors but making something completely his own, something born out of the complex experience of existing both inside and outside of Ethiopia’s cultural and political spheres during the mid-20th century. This makes the work resonate strongly with the social realism movement prevalent at the time. Curator: Yes! Exactly! This painting has such an internal logic, a feverish emotional reality rendered in paint. There's something almost naive about the color, childlike but wielded with such intensity! The composition looks effortless, and I'm willing to bet it was anything but. Editor: Indeed. And if you look closely, you see how the paint application serves almost as a record of that effort. Those visible strokes… each impasto touch contains gesture and deliberation. We can really start thinking about landscape in relation to personal or collective memory—what he included, what he omitted… it all becomes rather telling. Curator: I'm captivated. It makes you wonder what Desta saw, and what he was truly feeling when he laid down each stroke of paint on this landscape. It is really an invitation to feel. Editor: And by showing it today, we’re hopefully inviting a new audience to also encounter the artist and his era afresh.