Ficre Ghebreyesus: Color is Supreme

Ficre Ghebreyesus: Color is Supreme presented work by Ficre Ghebreyesus, the late Eritrean American artist whose practice moved between abstraction and figuration through rhythmically structured compositions and vivid color. The exhibition included paintings alongside photographs, ephemera, and pastels drawn from recent discoveries in the artist’s archive, offering a more expansive view of how memory, music, geometry, and everyday life shaped his art. Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001. April 2, 2026 — Runs through May 9, 2026. The gallery notes that the title comes from Ghebreyesus’s personal writing as an homage to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Across the exhibition, his paintings connect color-blocking, geometric pattern, and subtle figuration, while photographs from the 1990s made during his return to Eritrea to teach in a war zone were shown publicly for the first time since 1997. The presentation also emphasized the artist’s wider life as a painter, activist, restaurateur, and writer. By bringing together notebooks, studies, archival material, and finished works, Color is Supreme framed Ghebreyesus’s practice as one in which music, image, memory, and political history remain deeply interconnected.