Known for his 2017 maternity portraits of Beyoncé, Awol Erizku is an Ethiopian-American contemporary artist whose imagery bridges visual cultures, disrupting Eurocentric visions of art and beauty. He has photographed culturally significant figures for The New Yorker, GQ, and Vanity Fair.
Read MoreErizku is based in Los Angeles.
Erizku was born in 1988 in Gondar, Ethiopia. As a child, his family migrated to New York, where he grew up in the Bronx.
Erizku graduated with a BFA at The Cooper Union School of Art in Manhattan in 2010. While studying, alongside experimentations with neon and light works, Erizku produced one of his most well-known early works, Girl With a Bamboo Earring (2009). Erizku replaced the sitter of Vermeer's 1665 painting with a Black woman adorned with heart-shaped bamboo earrings. Other early re-imaginings of the art-historical canon include Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine (c. 1489) as a contemporary Black woman with a pit bull in her arms, a Caravaggio-esque Boy Holding Grapes (2012), and a Teen Venus (2013) presented in a maple 22-karat gold leaf frame.
Erizku completed his MFA at Yale University in 2014, and within a year had presented his work at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Erizku's practice spans photography, sculpture, painting, installation, film, and sound, developing his own Afro-centric aesthetic of 'Afro-esotericism'. He references the aesthetics and symbolism of the historical and contemporary art canon, pop culture, ancient mythology, African art, spirituality, hip-hop, trap, and global Black culture.
Erizku's portrait photography hit the headlines in 2017 when he collaborated with pop icon Beyoncé on a series of photographs to announce her pregnancy. The first image released rendered the music superstar, pregnant with twins, as a Black modern-day Madonna. The picture accumulated eight million likes on Instagram in less than 24 hours. It was followed by further photographs including a Botticelli-style nude titled Venus.
Other than Beyoncé, Erizku has created countless portraits of high-profile Black luminaries, including Viola Davis, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, Donald Glover, and Michael B. Jordan. His portraits have been published in The New Yorker, SSENSE, GQ, Time, and Vogue, among other publications.
In 2021, Erizku photographed poet Amanda Gorman at the U.S. presidential inauguration for Time's 'Black Renaissance' issue. The artist styled the Renaissance-esque cover photo of Gorman in a yellow dress against a black background for a timeless, classical feel.
Beyond the magazines, Erizku has built a practice around symbolically loaded digital chromatic still lifes and imagery associated with African and African American culture.
Erizku brings a diverse selection of artefacts together in his continuously evolving lexicon of identity, held in sharp, colourful still lives such as Asiatic Lilies (2017), King of the Jungle (2017), Black Fire (Mouzone Brothas) (2019), and Malcolm x Freestyle (Pharaoh's Dance) (2019—2020).
In these images, objects rooted in history, hip-hop, and trap music come together in new temporal relations: busts of Nefertiti with sphinx and other Egyptian cat sculptures, X-Rite photography ColorChecker Classic charts, lilies, guns, African Masks, and Everlast boxing gloves.
The sphinx motif weaves throughout Erizku's photographic practice. The artist's lightbox-mounted body of work for the Gagosian show Memories of a Lost Sphinx (2022) conceptually fragments the sphinx—a figure with roots in ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Asian mythologies—into evocative component parts. An exhibited photograph of the back of a human head is a portrait of NBA star Kevin Durant.
Awol Erizku's takes his Afro-centric responses to endemic Eurocentricism beyond the photographic frame. In the video installation Serendipity (2015), first presented at MoMA, the artist takes a sledgehammer to a bust of David, replacing the sculpture with one of Nefertiti.
For the 2017 exhibition Make America Great Again at Ben Brown Fine Arts, London, Erizku presented a door scrawled with graffiti in which the 'T' of Trump is replaced by a swastika, and an American flag emblazoned with a snarling panther.
In Oh, What a Feeling, Fuck it, I Want a Billion (Purple) (2018)—inspired by lyrics from Jay-Z's _Picasso Baby—_Erizku re-imagines Donald Judd's Minimalist 'stacks' with a vertical row of seven regulation basketball rims and a precariously perched Spalding NBA ball.
The possibilities of neon and light have underpinned Erizku's practice since his Cooper Union days. His senior thesis work was a large-scale neon version of President Barack Obama's Twitter handle. Later, for New Flower (2015) at New York's FLAG Art Foundation, Erizku presented the phrase 'Addis Ababa'—a translation of the exhibition title—in neon-lit Amharic script.Erizku gives contemporary and historic symbols of Black resistance the neon treatment in Black Panther (Red Neon) (2018) and Fuck Twelve (2018) (an anti-police slogan). In Black Love (2021) Erizku continues this practice while paying homage to the history and significance of neon signage in Hong Kong's skyline and streetscapes.
In 2021, Public Art Fund displayed 13 Awol Erizku photographs on 350 bus shelters across New York City and Chicago simultaneously. The strikingly layered, colourful images of the series, titled 'New Visions for Iris', laid out starting points for an envisioned future dialogue with the artist's daughter on complex issues such as the treatment of hybrid identities in American society.
Awol Erizku has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Solo exhibitions include Memories of a Lost Sphinx, Gagosian, New York (2022); Mystic Parallax, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2020); and Make America Great Again, Ben Brown Fine Arts, London (2017).
Group exhibitions include Elegies: Still Lifes in Contemporary Art, Museum Of African Diaspora, San Francisco (2022); The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion, Aperture Gallery, New York (2019); ReSignifications, Museo Stefano Bardini, Florence (2015); Art2, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2011).
Awol Erizku's Instagram can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2023
