Merikokeb Berhanu CXXI, 2026

Merikokeb Berhanu's new paintings represent a significant development in her practice. Merikokeb continues to explore the semi-abstracted figurative language she has developed over the past decade, while pushing it into new chromatic and compositional territory. The work draws on a recurring visual vocabulary: interlocking organic forms that suggest bodies, landscapes, and cellular structures simultaneously, without resolving into any one of them. Equally fluid in their meaning are Merikokeb’s representations of the human body: individual feet or hands become visible but embody a more generalized human presence; elongated shapes with rounded heads could represent a group of flowers just as much as a community of men and women. Fragments of the human body are woven into a conflation of vegetal, organic, and perhaps even mineral form.