Maskal Flower

The Maskal flower — the yellow daisy that carpets the Ethiopian highlands every September during the feast of the True Cross — recurs throughout Afewerk Tekle's work, but never so purely as here. The canvas is almost abstract: a field of gold and saffron, edged with the particular blue of an Ethiopian September sky. There are no figures. There is only the flower, magnified, simplified, elevated.

On the work

Painted in 1959 — the same year Afewerk received the Africa Hall commission — Maskal Flower represents the private counterpoint to his vast public work. Where the Africa Hall windows demanded a political vision spanning a continent, this canvas turned inward: a single flower, a single season, the particular light of the Ethiopian highlands in September.

The artist himself was clear about what the work meant: "The flower is not an escape. The flower is Ethiopia. To paint the flower is to make a political statement — it is to say: this will survive." The Maskal daisy, tied to the Orthodox Christian feast of the True Cross, carries centuries of cultural memory. Afewerk's decision to magnify and simplify it — to strip away all narrative and let the form itself carry the weight — was as deliberate as any of his monumental compositions.