Tegene Kunbi: Bending Back

Tegene Kunbi was born in 1980 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. He completed a Painting and Art Education degree at the Fine Arts School at the University of Addis Abeba in 2004 and went on to teach at Kotebe College Academy. With the help of the prestigious DAAD scholarship, he left Ethiopia in 2008 to study at the Universität der Künste Berlin, where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts in 2011. He now works in Berlin and has been part of multiple group and solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad as well as collaborative international projects and workshops, for example in Paris, Casablanca, New York, Nairobi, Nouakchott, and Amsterdam. Kunbi is also the winner of the prestigious award Grand Prix Léopold Sédar Senghor at Dak’Art Biennale 2022.

Kunbi creates compositions of different geometric shapes and colours, which express his personal vision of his native landscape, fabrics, clothes, and wall paintings. Oil and textile combine to create surfaces of vibrant textures and layers of color. A dominant feature in his works is its use of strident and assertive colours. The abstract vertical and horizontal stripes and blocks of color in Kunbi’s paintings nonetheless bear close affinities to the brilliant hues of Ethiopian heritage in Orthodox or Coptic manuscripts, murals and various patterned textiles.

Bending Back, the title of the show, resonates with the process that the artist undertakes to create his works. With increasing intensity, the process of creation of Kunbi’s art is composed by a deep self-interpretation and response between the harmony of the colours and the harmony of his spirit. Bending back, draws attention to the countless moments in which the artist has looked back on his decision made on the canvas, a fundamental process that helps the works to bloom and becoming incredible and intimate creations of the artist. By reflecting and questioning himself, Kunbi looks back on his decisions, that will remain forever on the canvas and accepts them, embraces them, recognizing those signs as the word coming out from his own subconscious that states in his mind.

Bending Back, in the words of the artist, means accepting these steps, whether they turn out to be right or wrong. Therefore, Looking back to the past, in order to be able to live and create with the present, becomes the prerogative that allows his works to come to life. This is also a metaphor on the way that we live our lives, accepting what we went through and elaborating it, is the only way to build our present and future.

VENUE: Standing Pine, Nagoya (PART2 3F, 2 Chome-5-24 Nishiki, Naka Ward, Nagoya, Aichi 460-0003 – CLOSED)
HOURS: 1:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
CONTACT: info@standingpine.jp