MATA SEMAY

A new body of work by Tariku Shiferaw will be showing

at Smack Mellon, in a group exhibition curated by

Rachel Steinberg on June 25th, 2022

"Shiferaw’s new series “Mata Semay” (Amharic for “night skies”) was recently featured at Frieze London. One of these luminous paintings, Adinkrahine (2021), is a further interrogation into the artist’s use of black and blue, yet now incorporating a more circular, mediative mark with a central opening. “The object itself becomes a mark,” Shiferaw said. This body of work is ongoing, similar to the persistent explorations in his sketchbooks, and necessarily so. The work depicts a boundless expanse of sky, imagining and inviting the ongoing contributions of Black artists and visualizing a canonical shift for Black artists in the present day."

​

The Artsy Vanguard: Tariku Shiferaw written by Erica Cardwell