Tadias Magazine

Above: Simé walks among some of his sculptures at the
Santa Monica Museum of Art. Credit: Michael Robinson
Chavez/LAT.

To step into the fantastically jam-packed installation now at the Santa Monica Museum of Art is to step into another world: a nuanced universe suffused with compassion, sensuality and wisdom, a place so far removed from the cold calculations and multi-tasking distractions of life in Los Angeles that it seems you have to be a specialist (or very privileged) to go there.

It’s all too easy to see the 60-plus sculptures, 40-odd paintings, seven thrones and five wall reliefs by Ethiopian artist Elias Simé as an anthropologist would: ingenious artifacts from a fully formed culture fundamentally different from our own and probably part of a way of life being squeezed out by global consumerism.

But “Elias Simé: Eye of the Needle, Eye of the Heart” is nothing of the sort. Read more.

Related: For Ethiopian artist Elias Simé, every object tells a story (LAT)

The artist who has created these works is the subject of an unusual retrospective, “Elias Simé: Eye of the Needle, Eye of the Heart.” A quiet, burly man with a soft smile, Simé, 41, is from Ethiopia, where he is already well known. Three years ago he leapt onto the international scene when invited to participate in the New Crowned Hope Festival, organized by über-impresario Peter Sellars as part of Vienna’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. Simé’s work often integrates recycled objects, not to make an environmental or economic statement, he says, but because “they have a story. Like the old buttons I use in my work, I can feel the people who wore them.”

“Every object is telling stories, has a history,” Read More.

HuffingtonPost.com
Peter Clothier
Posted January 28, 2009

It is not often, these days, that I walk into an exhibition space and feel those familiar symptoms–the heart beating harder, faster, the head spinning with awe, the blood running through the veins–by which I recognize that I’m in the presence of genius. And I don’t mean just that intellectual brilliance we too often associate with the word in its casual use, but something closer to its profounder meaning, a transcendent connection between humanity and what I can only describe with the word “spirit.” It’s an expression of greatness, of the awesome potential of the imagination, of the boundless, passionate creativity that can spring from a single, singular human mind.

Read More at HuffingtonPost.com