Dawit Abebe Ethiopia, b. 1978

Dawit Abebe was born in 1978 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he continues to live and work. He graduated from the Alle School of Fine Art and Design at Addis Ababa University in 2001 with a diploma encompassing painting, sculpture, graphics, photography, and industrial design. That same year, he co-founded Habesha Art Studio in Addis Ababa, a collective and residency space where he has remained a full-time artist-in-residence ever since. Alongside his studio practice, Abebe has engaged in community work, collaborating with organisations including UNICEF to lead art workshops for street children in Addis Ababa, Arba Minch, and Jinka.

Abebe's practice is rooted in a sustained examination of the forces shaping contemporary life at both local and global scales. His large canvases are constructed through a distinctive process: once primed, they are collaged with pages from old exercise books bought at Addis Ababa flea markets, then layered with paint that functions simultaneously as background and image-bearer. This material logic mirrors his conceptual concerns, as meaning in his work is always stratified, never simply on the surface. His thematic vocabulary encompasses the politics of surveillance and individual freedom, the impact of technological acceleration on human communication, the tension between development and environment, and the negotiation of identity across cultural borders. The X-Privacy series (2012) examined power and collective freedom through a critical lens; Liminal in the Age of Mobile-ty (2018) used smartphones and social media symbols to probe the fragmented, in-between spaces of digitally mediated communication; and Mutual Identity (2017) extended these concerns through works on paper. His 2024 work A Conversation with Self continues this autobiographical thread, reflecting on interiority and self-perception. Abebe has noted that each body of work organically seeds the next, creating a continuous and evolving artistic vocabulary.

Dawit Abebe's work is held in significant public and private collections internationally, among them the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin (USA); the Barjeel Art Foundation (UAE); the Rema Hort Mann Foundation (USA); the Frank Cohen Collection (UK); the Ilham Collection (Malaysia); the Easton Capital Collection (USA); and the Fondation Gandur pour l'Art, Geneva (Switzerland). In 2021, Abebe received the First Place Award from the Ethiopian Ministry of Culture. In 2017, the French government named him Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. In 2019, Artnet selected him as one of the two most important artists working out of Ethiopia today, and in 2021 he was included in African Artists: From 1882 to Now, the landmark Phaidon publication on modern and contemporary African art.

Abebe has exhibited widely across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. Solo exhibitions include Blackboxat AKKA Project, Venice (2026); Mutual Identity at Addis Fine Art Gallery, Addis Ababa (2018); "Quo Vadis?" in London (2017); and X-Privacy at Alliance Ethio-Française, Addis Ababa (2012). Major group exhibitions include Insistent Presence: Contemporary African Art from the Chazen Collection, which toured to the Palmer Museum at the University of Pennsylvania (2026), the Carlos Museum at Emory University, Atlanta (2025), and the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin (2023); Abenteuer Körper at Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany (2025); Kubatana at Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway (2019); the Karachi Biennial (2019); and Imago Mundi at Salone degli Incanti, Trieste (2018).

Dawit Abebe participated in the artist-in-residence program at 68projects by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin from October 2017 to March 2018. The residency resulted in the solo exhibition Liminal in the Age of Mobile-ty, presented at 68projects, Fasanenstrasse 68, Berlin, from 26 April to 16 June 2018. The exhibition comprised seven paintings on canvas alongside three works on paper under the title Mutual Identity, all produced during the Berlin residency period. In 2024, Abebe was included in Berlin on My Mind, the group exhibition at 68projects by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin celebrating ten years of the gallery's artist-in-residence program, alongside twenty other alumni. His practice continues to expand in scope and ambition, moving between Addis Ababa and international exhibition venues while remaining grounded in the social and political realities of his home city.