# Spotlight: Tariku Shiferaw – Defiant Imaginations

URL: https://vielmetter.com/exhibitions/spotlight-tariku-shiferaw-2025/
October 11 — November 15, 2025 · Viewing Room · Artists: Tariku Shiferaw

**Installation photo credit: Brica Wilcox**
 [RSVP For Artist Conversation Here](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/in-conversation-tariku-shiferaw-and-dhyandra-lawson-tickets-1770893623499?aff=oddtdtcreator)

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce our Spotlight presentation of works by New York-based artist Tariku Shiferaw. Titled *Defiant Imaginations*, this focused presentation of three new paintings reflect on the artist’s creative output as a tool of resistance and defiance. The works will be on view from October 11th to November 15th, 2025, and the gallery will host a conversation between Tariku Shiferaw and curator Dhyandra Lawson on October 25th at 3 pm, with a reception to follow.

Shiferaw’s recent paintings use mark-making as a means to layer and superimpose intangible ideas with imprints of physical actions and objects culled from varied histories and lineages. The use of translucent materials overlayed with bold, graphic bars and grid patterns creates a dynamic interplay between presence and absence, exposure and obfuscation, surface and the illusion of depth.

The painting *Tezeta (Mulatu Astatke)* refers to a song by the Ethiopian jazz musician, and is part of a series of works that borrow their titles from music of the African diaspora, drawing on source materials from beyond the boundaries of a Eurocentric canon. In the titular work, *Defiant Imaginations,* a lustrous semitransparent layer of midnight blue covers all but a small, window-like square near the center of the painting, where vivid colors and gestural strokes radiate through the lattice of an opaque grid. For Shiferaw, the grid is both a nod to the visual language of abstraction and its history in modern art, and a metaphor for the systems and structures imposed on us at the societal level.

Part of Shiferaw’s *Mata Semay* (meaning*“*night skies” in Amharic) series, this painting is suffused with the rich hues of the night sky, a vast space of myth-making, constellations, and cultural projections of meaning. The connotation of the sky invites the viewer to consider more expansive ways of looking, beyond what can be neatly mapped out or contained within a grid. Another work in this series, *There Are Other Suns,* incorporates a small Dogon brass representation of the sun against a yellow background. Its varying depths and textures, which include iridescent film, mylar, wood, and cloth, shift in and out of visibility depending on the angle from which the work is viewed. Shiferaw’s title riffs on a common phrase to expand our understanding beyond a singular, often Western lens, and embraces a multiplicity of perspectives without limitation.