Tigist Yoseph Ron
Lives & Works in Ra’anana, Israel
Tigist Yoseph Ron was born in Gondar, Ethiopia and, at the age of seven, immigrated to Israel under Operation Moses – a covert military operation which air lifted nearly 8,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel. Ethiopian Jews, known as Beta Israel, faced prejudice and violence for many years, and are said, in Beta Israel tradition, to be descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. In her expressive charcoal drawings, Ron depicts portraits and impressions informed by questions of identity, national identity, femininity, motherhood, and self-determination. Her works often draw from her personal environment and explore her relationship with her mother, who died when she was sixteen years old, and the shared experience of Ethiopian Jews, as well as the crisis of immigration from Ethiopia to Israel.
In Ron’s black and white charcoal drawings, the use of light charges depictions of mothers and children with movement and emotion – the children constantly fidgeting, the mothers tirelessly fussing. While their identity and distinct features are often obscured, gestures of light and sharp black tracings bring clarity to the figures, their gestures, and their relationships to other people and forms depicted. Ron was recently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art entitled “The White Paper is Black Within” (2020-2021), as well as the recipient of the 2019 Haim Shiff Prize for Figurative-Realist Art. She lives and works in Ra’anana, Israel.
Tigist Yoseph Ron will be presented by Fridman Gallery.
Tigist Yoseph Ron, After the Wedding, 2022, Charcoal on Paper, 115.6 x 77.5 cm. Courtesy of Artist and Fridman Gallery.
