Ethiopia-born gallery Addis Fine Art is opening its first permanent London gallery this October. The split-level, 2,000 sq. ft museum is located on Eastcastle Street, in the heart of Fitzrovia’s gallery district.
The new museum will open with a show of works by Nirit Takele, an artist who was born in Ethiopia in 1985 but moved to Israel in 1991 as part of Operation Solomon that saw more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews evacuated.
“What I realised was that the best strategy for us is to have a grounded place in London where we can have eight or ten shows a year and also continue growing our digital sales, because they have been an absolute lifeline and been where we’ve discovered a lot of our new clients in this time,” says Rakeb Sile, who co-founded Addis Fine Art in 2016 with Mesai Haileleul.
The gallery is participating in Frieze London (13-17 October) in the Focus section, its first time applying to the fair, with a presentation of paintings by the Ethiopian artist Merikokeb Berhanu who, Sile says, is “getting a lot of traction with curators at the moment”. Meanwhile, over at 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair (14-17 September) at Somerset House, Addis will show works by its diaspora artists—Tariku Shiferaw, Helina Metaferia, Tsedaye Makonnen and Tesfaye Urgessa. The gallery has also just returned from showing at the Armory Show in New York, where it exhibited the works of Tizta Berhanu, another Ethiopian artist.
Addis Fine Art will retain its original space in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which Sile describes as an “incubator” for younger artists and a “gallery that allows artists to come home and share their artwork in Ethiopia.” Logistics are difficult in Ethiopia, Sile says, so “we can never really do 10 shows a year there—four or five shows a year is pretty much what we aim for.” Most importantly, it’s a place for a local audience to be able to come and see art in a country where public institutions are in short supply.
