Ethiopian art

Aksum

In the first centuries CE, the kingdom of Aksum in what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea traded across the Red Sea with Rome, Arabia and India, minted its own coins and raised monumental stelae carved from single blocks of granite. The tallest are carved to look like multi-storey buildings, with false doors and windows. One, taken to Rome in 1937 on Mussolini's orders, was returned to Ethiopia in 2005 and set up again in Aksum. The site is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

A Christian art

King Ezana of Aksum adopted Christianity in the fourth century, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has shaped the country's art ever since.

• Manuscripts. The Garima Gospels, kept at a monastery in northern Ethiopia, have been radiocarbon dated to between about the fourth and seventh centuries, which would make them among the oldest illustrated Christian manuscripts in the world. Illuminated books on parchment remained a living art for well over a thousand years.
• Churches. At Lalibela, eleven churches were cut down into the living rock in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, during the reign of King Lalibela; they are a World Heritage Site and still in use. In Gondar, the church of Debre Berhan Selassie, from the seventeenth century, is famous for a ceiling painted with rows of winged angels' faces.
• Icons. Painted on wooden panels, often as diptychs and triptychs, Ethiopian icons show the Virgin Mary, saints and scenes of the Gospel with large almond-shaped eyes, bold outlines and flat, bright colours. Good figures are usually painted facing the viewer, evil ones in profile. In the fifteenth century the painter Fre Seyon became the best known of the masters of Marian icons.
• Crosses. Processional crosses in brass and silver, with intricate openwork, and small hand crosses carried by priests vary from region to region and are among Ethiopia's most recognisable art forms.

Popular painting

From the late nineteenth century, painters trained in the church tradition also painted on canvas for a wider public. Favourite subjects included the Battle of Adwa of 1896, in which Ethiopia defeated an Italian army, and the story of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon told in rows of comic-strip panels — a style still painted for visitors today.

Modern Ethiopian art

The Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts, inaugurated in 1958 and founded by the painter Ale Felege Selam, trained most of the country's modern artists. Among the best known:

• Afewerk Tekle (1932–2012), who designed the monumental stained-glass windows of Africa Hall in Addis Ababa, the headquarters of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, inaugurated in 1961.
• Gebre Kristos Desta (1932–1981), who studied in Germany and became a pioneer of abstract painting in Ethiopia.
• Skunder Boghossian (1937–2003), who worked in Paris and later taught at Howard University in Washington, and whose visionary paintings mixed Ethiopian sources with surrealism.

Contemporary artists

Ethiopian-born artists are among today's most visible: Julie Mehretu (born 1970 in Addis Ababa) paints vast layered abstractions; Elias Sime (born 1968) builds large works from recycled electronic parts, wires and circuit boards; Aida Muluneh (born 1974) is a leading photographer.

Ethiopian textiles

Ethiopia also has a strong weaving tradition: white cotton cloths such as the netela shawl, with coloured woven borders called tibeb, are still worn on holidays and to church. See African textiles.

Related

Ethiopia's art belongs to the wider story of East African art and of our short history of African art. Across the border, Sudan's Ibrahim El-Salahi built a modern art from another meeting of African, Arab and religious traditions. In Addis Ababa, the National Museum of Ethiopia shows Ethiopian painting from early parchment to the modern masters.