Selamawit Girma: Iconography After the Diaspora

Selamawit Girma grew up in Addis Ababa surrounded by the gold-leaf icons of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. At 19, she moved to London to study fine art at Goldsmiths. Today, her studio in Peckham is filled with portraits that feel ancient and urgently contemporary at the same time.

Her paintings borrow the frontal gaze, the flattened perspective, and the luminous palette of Ethiopian iconography, but her subjects are not saints. They are her neighbors, her family, and strangers she meets on the street.

The Grammar of Icons

'I am not making religious paintings,' Girma explains. 'But I am using a visual language that carries centuries of meaning. When I paint someone with that frontal gaze, I am saying: this person is worthy of being seen. That is a political act.'

Her technique is meticulous. She prepares her own grounds using traditional gesso, layers thin glazes of pigment in the manner of the old masters, and occasionally incorporates gold leaf, a direct reference to the icons she grew up with.

Diaspora and Identity

Living between two cultures has sharpened Girma's sense of what she wants to say. 'In Ethiopia, my work is seen as modern. In London, it is seen as African. I exist in the gap between those two readings, and that gap is where my work lives.'

Her latest series, 'After the Crossing', will be exhibited at the Addis Fine Art Gallery in May 2026 before traveling to London later in the year.