Awol Erizku

Courtesy of the Artist and Ben Brown Fine Arts, London, Hong Kong, Palm Beach, and New York

Born in Ethiopia in 1988, Los Angeles-based artist Awol Erizku’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses photography, painting, film, sculpture and installation, creating a new vernacular that exists at the intersection of image making and language. Bridging the visual and cultural gap between African and Black American cultures, Erizku’s work rejects Eurocentric notions of art and beauty in favor of building his singular Afrocentric aesthetic, something he refers to as “Afro-esotericism.” With a distinctive emphasis on reclaiming and reinterpreting historical narratives within a contemporary context, Erizku’s work challenges viewers to reconsider conventional perspectives on art and society through a lens that merges personal narrative with broader socio-political commentary.

A canny synthesizer of symbols from popular culture and the tropes of art history, Erizku references disparate signifiers to inform his political, intellectual, and formal inquiries. Renaissance portraiture, Dutch still life painting, and the contemporary art canon all inform his visual vocabulary. Similarly, Erizku draws from multiple historic and aesthetic sources, including African art, assemblage, realism, conceptual art, and performance. Taking a holistic approach to object and experience making, Erizku weaves alternate narratives that interrogate art history, philosophy, linguistics, and artistic inclusion.

Erizku received a BFA from The Cooper Union, New York, in 2010, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, in 2014. His work has been exhibited at prominent institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; The Studio Museum, Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah. Erizku's works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; By Art Matters, Hangzhou Contemporary Art Museum, Hangzhou; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah. Erizku also brings high concept to commercial photography highlighting cultural and creative leaders for publications such as The New Yorker, New York Magazine, GQ and Vanity Fair.