Lulseged Retta: A Renowned Artist Who Has Traveled Far from Addis Ababa to the Addis Art Galley in Los Angeles Lulseged Retta was borne in Addis Ababa in 1952. From 1973 to 1977 he attended the Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts. Following his graduation, he worked as stage designer at the Yehager Fiker Theater, the first theater founded by Ethiopian patriots in 1942. In 1979, he was awarded a scholarship and studied art at the Repine Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, Russia. After returning to his country with an MFA, he became head artist at the Ethiopian Tourist Trade Corporation. While he worked with the Yehager Fiker Theater, Lulseged was able to study and determine the creative ethos and psychic of his contemporary artists and become acquainted with several well-known Ethiopian actors and actresses. His years at the Ethiopian Tourist and Trading Corporation were both productive and challenging. He constantly strived to develop his own creative identity in both fine art and commercial illustration. His natural strength as a draftsman helped him work in heavy illustration in his own natural technique and let him produce what he and the Corporation wanted to achieve. His first successes came when he designed, developed, and illustrated a silkscreen work of church/folk art style images that described different daily activities, an impressive series of posters and greeting cards with figures adapted from traditional motifs and representations. These works were reproduced and printed and commercialized worldwide by the Corporation. While working with the Corporation, Lulseged indeed established a fine reputation as an accomplished graphic artist. In 1988, following his success with the Ethiopian Tourist and Trade Corporation, Lulseged organized his first solo show at the Alliance Ethio-Françasie, Addis Ababa. His artistic and substantial financial success during this and other regular exhibitions was gratifying to him and encouraged him to fulfill his lifelong aspiration and become a full-time artist. In January of 2001, in an extensive conversation with him about his art and artistic integrity, I learned more about his feeling, passion, and artistic accountability. I came to know that, like several other artists of his generation, Lulseged is conscious of the historical significance of his artistic undertakings. Composed and articulate, he was eager to tell me his views about art and artists in Ethiopia and who and what inspired him to become an artist. He mentioned the names of several art instructors in Ethiopia as well as in Russia and also friends who had helped and advised him during both hard times and good times. Tadesse Mesfin, the most talked about artist of contemporary Ethiopia whom others praise and admire, was one friend Lulseged appreciated most. In fact, according to him, he decided to join the graphics art section at the Repine Academy of Arts in Russia, where Tadesse studied solely on Tadesse’s recommendation and advice. When it came to the dozen or more works displayed in his living room studio that day, he gave me a hint as to what inspires him to create his work and the time frame in which they are completed. Other than that, he candidly suggested to me not to ask him about their meaning, but rather to search and find out their meaning for myself and tell him and others about what I saw. Even if I tend to see or favor a work of art with meaning, I was more ready to look at his work to please my eyes rather than look to its meaning. His work is rooted in the psychological makeup of modern Ethiopian reality. “To me art is what I am” Lulseged told me. Ethiopian art of his generation is what Ethiopian modern society is. We see the very poetry of Ethiopian mystery and the realism of the early and late 20th century and the present day turbulent years. Then again, I do not think he deliberately wants to make his art Ethiopian and of Ethiopia. If the works look and express the very essence and particulars of Ethiopia, it is because they are of an Ethiopian. If the motives and iconographies are Ethiopian, as Zerhiun Yetmegeta said some three decades ago, it is simply because they are there and naturally have become part of the artistic expression and the creative work. There is nothing as tricky and deceptive as trying to understand thematic meaning and then later discuss, let alone write about, an artistic work. It is particularly difficult when we know the artist and his work is by all accounts close to our own experience. As much as we love to talk, discuss, or even write about our contemporary artists and their works simply because art and artists do matter and have significance in our culture and lives, we hardly can be objective and dispassionate. Our personal interpretation and criticism of the works is always prevalent. These artists and their works do not yet have the essential sense of distance that can let them receive the reverence and the respect that a span of time provides, so there is the danger of our dumping on the art our own subjective, personal experiences. After studying his statements and works and seeing his recent works exhibited at the Addis Art Gallery, I still cannot say I have reached the point where I can communicate their meaning with complete certainty. What I prefer to put in writing then is his artistic sentiment, his artistic accountability, and the relation he and his work have to other contemporary Ethiopian artists and art. By 2005, Lulseged Retta had become a renowned painter and graphic artist and the first artist of his generation who had studied in Russia to show his work regularly and became a full-time studio artist. Several friends of his contemporaries, also MFA holders from Russia, but salaried artists, have shown their work in-group and solo shows. However, it is Lulseged who actively exhibit his work in different galleries as well as in cultural centers of foreign countries in Addis Ababa. He is also the first Ethiopian artist of his generation to hold several solo exhibitions in the United States. In addition to his participation in several cultural and entertainment shows, he has had three solo shows in Washington D.C., the last two organized by the Addis Art gallery owner. Again, on August 6, 2005, Addis Art Gallery, which is located in Los Angeles near Little Ethiopia, showed 40 of his works. This is his major and most recent exhibition, his fourth solo show in the United States. Through the years, Lulseged has moved slowly from a more naturalistic and at times ambiguous representation to symbolic representation. In abandoning the fine line of his academic teaching and what his admired instructors pioneered and his close friends, particularly Tadesse Mesfin, refined and others now build upon and follow; Lulseged applies his recognizable technique effectively and constantly. His vision is crystallized in the tragic atmosphere of his country, devastated by bloody civil war, famine, AIDS, and political unrest, all of which erode and repress the culture constantly. As the questions of his generation become how to break with this vicious cycle and conundrum, again like his admired friends, like the activist, and the non-propagandist painters of contemporary Ethiopia, Lulseged work within a perpetual drama of creation. He is persistently looking to other forms of creation and other sources of inspiration. His work is gaining more and more momentum and a unique purpose that heightens and alters the consciousness by bringing us closer in the most sensitive cultural and artistic way. In his eyes, the works appear to be involved more with content than with style. He is not painting any subject and thinking of just creating a good painting; he thinks of subject matter as being also crucial. There is a lot more to Lulseged’s works than meets our pleasure and eye. The works of 20th century Ethiopian Artists honor describe and paint the nation, its art, and its people. Ethiopia and Ethiopian society and, its culture and art have been the force and source of inspiration, ethos, and muse for Ethiopian modern artists of the 1920s, 1940s and even for the Ethiopian modernists, the Zemenay artists of the late 1960s. Whatever the outcomes, the artists have their country and its society as their artistic challenge. With the exception of the few “exit generation” artists of the 2000, who had an aesthetic interest in value in and for itself, the mechanism and the artistic challenge of contemporary Ethiopian artists revolve around the nation and its conundrum. That aspect is much truer now among the group of artists of the 1990s, I call the New Masters of Contemporary Ethiopian Art to which Lulseged belongs. As he explained to me Lulseged’s works express nothing more and nothing less than a reverence for his instructors, his friends, his family, his mother, and above all his country and the God who gave him the opportunity to do what he wanted to do in life. In short, the art and the culture of his country are his ultimate muse, the symbol of his creative inspiration. Lulseged’s singular qualities in representing his country and people emerge and developed while he was working with Ethiopian Tourist and Trading Corporation most noticeably in his graphic, silkscreen poster and greeting card works. His works are arranged as several themes. He presents themes that he calls Activity, Philosophy and Love. For me, the most impressive is his Love theme although his Philosophy and Activity themes are also touching and impressive. In his Love theme, there is a kind of tumultuous truth and also a convincing frankness. His analogies are apparent and absolutely just. The expression, for instance, of Mother and Child and another version of the same theme Father and Child both display a paternal and material love sensation we all know, and the theme is conveyed with a courage and a sureness that remind us of the Ethiopian old masters. The same is true of his countless works of these kinds with unstable forms and light created by technical accident. The wide open, exaggerated eyes, the head, and the faces of his slender portraits that he presents over and over again from picture to picture take on a new meaning and kindle a new connotation within each original framework. Most brilliant among these are the exaggerated wide open eyes, the national dress decorations, the figures from the back and the profiles, the people set in activity to imply life while the motifs and subjects promote several functions. Most obviously, by their regular repetitiveness, the works produce a certain thematic unity from picture to picture. No cultural or artistic achievement of the country, even the motifs of neighboring countries and their representations, is too minor to be appreciated and appropriated. In Lulseged’s art, each piece has its own glorious side, worthy of appreciation, contemplation, and enjoyment. Lulseged and some of his contemporaries have the intent to remind Ethiopians of what makes the country great and not so great by looking at the historical, the cultural, and the mythical. There are other contemporary Ethiopian artists who put the viewers in front of images that are real, but terribly sad and brutal. As much as we want to know more about an artist who picks his subject matter from topics of national significance, national culture, national art or history, we also are curious to know more about his social and political commitments. The question, whether there is any art as such that does expose the present day Ethiopian enigma or whether the nation or the society ever got the art it deserves is always there. It is therefore a disservice to contemporary Ethiopian artists not to see, analyze, and appreciate their work from the point of view of the contemporary Ethiopian conundrum. To let them go free or consider them unaccountable is also to consider them as corrupt or consider them as catalysts for simply maintaining the status quo. In the tradition of Ethiopian Modern art, it is very hard to think of a specific work of art or an artist who rejected or received ideas in order to subvert morality or displease society. As far as the tradition is concerned, there hardly was a scandalous, controversial, or outrageous act committed by art. I am not thinking of the nuts and bolts of art technique or art’s ‘secret laws and devices’ to which Lulseged and his contemporaries are constantly aspiring. I am rather thinking of artwork that disturbs the peace of mind and threatens comfort and the status quo. In a society where one cannot be what one wants to be the prudent artist resorts to symbolism. In three of Lulseged’s most ambitious works presented at Addis Art Gallery Street Life, Street Corner, and Addis by Night, all acrylics on canvas-- there are enigmatic unidentified faces and human figures, as though the images are coming into being from the primal matter of the paint itself. He puts us face to face with the déjà vu forcing us to witness conditions that are primarily there with him, with us, with the entire generation of Ethiopian urbanites. However, the numerous bewildered faces and eyes represented in the 15 different works with unidentified Portraits titled Portrait a through Portrait j displayed in the exhibition, one can see Lulseged’s concern and uncertainties for the Ethiopian society. As much as his sensitivity is reflected in his persona, his art expresses his seriousness and accountability. As Lulseged told me repeatedly, the exaggerated, wide opened eyes we see here, there, and everywhere in his work are not simple decorations or represent a pointless idea. They are pictogram of wisdom and symbols of the future still waiting to be hatched. By: Esseye G Medhin, August 2005