The Last Judgment

The largest canvas Afewerk Tekle ever produced, The Last Judgment runs over three metres wide and draws on the ancient tradition of Ethiopian church painting while placing it in conversation with Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling and with the abstract expressionism Afewerk had absorbed in New York in the 1970s. It is a work of calculated overwhelm: there is nowhere for the eye to rest.

On the work

The composition is organised in three tiers, as in Byzantine tradition. Below: the dead rising from a earth rendered in deep terracotta and umber. Middle: the weighing of souls, conducted by a figure whose face bears the formal simplifications of a Lalibela icon. Above: a light that is not God but is inseparable from the idea of God — a white and gold radiance that threatens to dissolve the upper third of the canvas entirely.

The work took four years to complete and occupied the whole of the main studio at Villa Alpha for much of that time. Afewerk would not allow it to be photographed during production. When it was finally unveiled at a private exhibition in 1984, the French ambassador is reported to have stood before it for twenty minutes without speaking.