Solomon Wolde’s artistic universe unfolds as a deeply moving and conceptually rich meditation on identity, memory, and the sacred geometry of collective experience. Rooted in the vibrant cultural terrain of Merkato, Addis Ababa, and shaped by personal loss and political upheaval, Wolde’s work bridges ancestral traditions with contemporary spiritual inquiries. His art is not simply created—it is channeled, invoking Ethiopia’s mystical energies and refracting them through modern forms.
The “Adbar Collider” and “Masked Memories” series reveal Wolde’s striking ability to render invisible forces—spiritual, cultural, feminine—into architectural and symbolic form. His use of “matterns”—geometric fragments derived from memory and myth—creates compositions that vibrate between chaos and order, absence and presence. These tessellated elements, rendered in oil and celastic, become carriers of time, trauma, and resilience.
Wolde’s masks are not static objects but sentient agents. They serve as portals to a shared African consciousness, confronting colonial erasure while embracing cosmic potential. His architectural backgrounds, though fractured, are not ruins—they are palimpsests of community, echoes of vanished utopias, and frames for rebirth.
His color palette—muted, achromatic, yet texturally alive—resonates with a mourning that
transcends personal grief, speaking to the fading but persistent spirits of home, family, and nationhood. In doing so, he constructs a poetic visual language that is at once local and cosmic. In an era obsessed with novelty, Solomon Wolde’s work is a reminder that radical art can also be spiritual, contemplative, and restorative. His practice invites us to step not just into a gallery space, but into a cosmology—a dance of memory, form, and ancestral presence.
Anna Gvozdeva
Curator of Visual Art Journal
visualartjournal.com
