Wosene Kosrof

Born in 1950, Wosene (as he prefers to be called) was a 1972 graduate of the School of Fine Arts in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He traveled to the United States and obtained an M.F.A. from Howard University in 1980. Wosene, who has since resided in the United States, has taught at the Addis Ababa School of Fine Art and in several colleges in the United States, including Vermont and Montpelier Colleges in Vermont. A prolific artist, his works have been featured in solo or group exhibitions worldwide, including the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Most recently Wosene's work has been featured in the Ethiopian Story in Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa, a current exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London as part of Africa 95 Festival of Arts. Recently, Wosene was awarded the Rockefeller Fellowship as an artist-in-residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy, becoming the first African artist ever to win such an award.

Wosene is unique among a group of young prominent Ethiopian artists who have developed a self-dependent, distinct style and character in their work. Wosene is distinguished for his aesthetic explorations of calligraphy in his paintings and sculpture. He makes use of the aesthetic as well as literary potential of calligraphic forms in Amharic and Geez, which have become integral to his paintings and incorporated as part of the aesthetic value of the whole work. His work Words of the Healer (1993) is an exquisite example of series of calligraphic explorations in which the literary, aesthetic, and magical qualities of the written word become inseparable. His innovative use of calligraphy as an aesthetic expression reaches its peak in his recent work She Ethiopia V, in which he uses mixed media on goat skin with Visa cards, Coca Cola cans, nails, and aluminum.