Elias Sime Ethiopian, b. 1968

Elias Sime (b.1968 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) deftly weaves, layers and assembles carefully selected everyday materials, transforming commonplace items into lyrical abstract compositions that suggest topography, figuration, and color fields. He often creates intricate works from electronic components—including circuit boards, computer keys, and telecommunications wires. For Sime, the history of these materials hold meaning and their significance emerges after thorough consideration. They suggest the tenuousness of our interconnected world, alluding to the frictions between tradition and progress, human contact and social networks, nature and the man-made, and physical presence and the virtual.

Sime’s work achieves effects from dense narrative to austere modernist abstraction. He is as interested in a stripped motherboard from a mobile phone as he is an animal skull or worn-out button: the artist looks past the emotional weighting of new versus old, instead finding renewal everywhere, and taking greatest interest in the way that objects and ideas can connect in new ways.

Sime has a masterful handling of material, with fluency and pure formal instincts a hallmark of his practice. In the past decade he has sought to better understand the cultural and historic underpinnings of those instincts, traveling with the anthropologist Meskerem Assegued through rural villages in Ethiopia to research ancient rituals still in practice. Sime collects histories and vernacular techniques as much as objects.

Holland Cotter of The New York Times writes, “Sime’s work, while culturally specific, has always been universalist. And although never without critical thrust — no one knows better the horrors visited on Africa by shipments of toxic Western e-waste — it is utopian.”

As an extension of his art-making, Sime is involved in the exploration of vernacular architecture. Working with his longtime collaborator, Assegued, Sime co-founded, designed, and built the award-winning Zoma Museum in Addis Ababa, an environmentally conscious international art center described by The New York Times in 2009 as “a voluptuous dream, a swirl of ancient technique and ecstatic imagination.” Zoma Museum celebrated its grand opening in its new location in March 2019, with expanded facilities that include a gallery space, library, children’s center, edible garden, elementary school, art and vernacular school, amphitheater, cafe and museum shop.

Sime has been the subject of major solo exhibitions, most recently Eregata እርጋታ at Arnolfini in Bristol, United Kingdom (2023), which was accompanied by a catalog and traveled to Hastings Contemporary in Hastings, United Kingdom (2024). Other solo exhibitions include Currents 118: Elias Sime at the Saint Louis Art Museum, MO (2020), Elias Sime: Tightrope, The Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, NY (2019), which traveled to the Akron Art Museum in Akron, Ohio, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. His installation, Roots, is on permanent view at the Johns Hopkins University, Washington D.C.

The solo exhibition Elias Sime: Dichotomy ፊት አና ጀርባ, an official Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, was on view from April through November 2024 at Spazio Tana, Castello in Venice, organized by Kunstpalast Düsseldorf. Selected works from this presentation are currently featured in Echo የገደል ማሚቶ, a solo exhibition at the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf in Germany. The exhibition will run through June 2025. 

Sime has been featured in numerous group exhibitions and biennales, including Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, AR (2023); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX (2023); the 59th Venice Biennale, Italy (2022); Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom (2021); NEON, Athens, Greece (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL (2018). In 2019, Sime received an African Art Award from the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and was shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize 2020.

Elias Sime’s work is in the permanent collections of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, AR; Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, Santa Fe, NM; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Johns Hopkins University Campus Collection, Baltimore, MD; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND; Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; Pizzuti Collection at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Rollins Museum of Art, Rollins College, Orlando, FL; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada; Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY; Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan.