There was a cold day at a market in Addis Ababa. Heavy rain had driven most traders home, but some stayed, waiting out the weather, hoping to earn enough to bring food back. Daniel Abera was watching. He described feeling something close to sorrow for the people still there—and then, almost in the same breath, he described the scene as beautiful. Blue-grey light, pattern, figures, the whole arrangement of the place in the rain. He went back to the studio and painted it. The work is called A Cold Day, and when he talks about it, he is careful to head off a particular misreading: "It's not about struggle or sadness. I wanted to paint what I feel about the place, what I feel about the general identity of the market."
That correction matters to him. Abera, who graduated from the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design at Addis Ababa University in 2025, has been building a body of work around the city's markets for several years now, and the persistent risk he seems to be working against is the one where the subject swallows the painting. A market, in his account, is not a subject so much as a site—a place that holds identity, memory, the shape of a society at a given moment. When he looks at one, he said, he sees art, identity, memory, laughter, sadness, and feeling all at once. The market is the occasion. What he is actually after is harder to name.
He is twenty-three, working in acrylic, marker, and collage on canvas, and the Market Series is what he has been refining since finishing his degree. But the practice goes back further. Before art school, he worked with a loose group of people who met to draw still lifes and portraits, and he understood painting then as essentially a skill of accurate depiction. The Alle School changed that. He described the shift without drama: the lecturers showed him that art could go beyond representation, that making something from nothing was the point. It sounds like a commonplace, but for Abera it was a genuine rupture. He stopped believing that a painting's job was to look like its subject.
The evidence of that rupture is clearest in an earlier series called ISOSpeak, made during his third year at Alle. The central image was an eyeball in circular motion—ritualistic, he said, and charged with what he called a "giant energy." He wanted viewers to feel that anything could be seen differently, that the eye itself was a force capable of manipulation and transformation. The series was about vision in the broader sense: not how we see things, but how much seeing matters. It was also, he said, a form of social criticism, though he was reluctant to spell out the terms of that criticism. The visual language was surrealist; the underlying concern was the same one that runs through the market paintings. He put it plainly: the core idea across his work is the same, expressed in different visual languages each time.
The dossier records a group show at Addis Ababa University in 2025 and a group show at Aurora Addis Gallery in Addis Ababa in 2024—the two public contexts in which his work has appeared so far. He has not described either exhibition at length. The gallery show came before he had finished his degree, which means the market paintings were already developed enough to hold their own outside an academic setting. Which works appeared in which show, and how they were received, is not recorded in the available source material.
What has changed between ISOSpeak and the current series is not the underlying preoccupation but the formal approach, and that change is worth tracing. Early in the Market Series, Abera said, he was drawn to the decorative quality of the spaces—the patterns, the accumulation of goods and people, the visual density. Over time he began pulling back, removing elements, narrowing his focus. The paintings became less crowded. He described the process as subtracting what was not aligned with what he was feeling, and noted that the changes were incremental: "One small change you make today, after six months, it's plus six months of a tiny change."
The painting he pointed to as the clearest evidence of that reduction is Keter, made in 2026, 160 by 90 centimetres. He described it as the last work in the current series: two or three figures, a television set on a bench or table, a suggestion of landscape at the edges. No crowded scene. The elements that remain are there because they carry something specific about a particular place and time—he used the phrase "a specific time and place" more than once, as though anchoring the work against the risk of vagueness. The patterned cloth on a figure, the flat abstract landscape behind them: these are not decorative choices. They are, in his account, the minimum required to make the feeling of the market present without illustrating the market directly. Compared to A Cold Day, where the rain, the remaining traders, and the blue-grey atmosphere all press against each other, Keter is spare. The television set is an odd, specific intrusion—domestic technology in a market setting—and he did not explain it further. That unexplained detail is one of the more interesting things about the painting as he describes it.
That phrase—"the feeling of the market"—is the closest he comes to describing what the paintings are actually for. He is not trying to document. He is not making social commentary in any programmatic sense. He wants, he said, "that exaggerated feeling of a specific time and place of a market." The exaggeration is key: he pushes the blue colder, flattens the figures into pattern, reduces the landscape to suggestion. The aim is not a record but a sensation, and the sensation is meant to carry the identity of the place without spelling it out.
He is equally clear about what he expects from a viewer, which is: nothing in particular. He does not want to preach, and he does not want to install a specific reading. He said he assigns his feeling to the canvas and considers his job done at that point—what the audience brings to the work is their own business. He mentioned being surprised, sometimes, by how audiences read paintings he has made. That surprise seems to be something he welcomes rather than manages.
A thread that runs through the conversation, and through the work as he describes it, is the question of what a place holds beyond what it looks like. In A Cold Day, the market holds the cold, the rain, the people who stayed and the people who left, the blue-grey light, and the pattern of goods laid out on the ground. In Keter, stripped of most of that, it holds two or three figures, a television, and a landscape that is barely there. Between those two paintings is a decision about how much a viewer needs in order to feel the place rather than simply recognise it. Abera has been moving steadily toward less. Whether Keter represents a limit or a waypoint is not something he has settled. He said he would not stop until he had made something that held the feeling of the market without looking like a market—what he called "that unmarkety feeling of a work with a marketing inspiration." He does not think he has made that work yet.
The practice is still early, and Abera knows it. When he talks about the market series, he is not talking about a finished project. He said there were "really, really tough questions" he intended to ask in future work, but he did not name them. What is clear is that the reduction he has been practising—fewer elements, more specificity, the colour atmosphere established before the figures—is not a style he has arrived at so much as a direction he is still moving in.
He described the accumulation of those small changes with an image that stayed with him: art is like a language, and a language can grow and die. Spend enough time with it and it moves somewhere you could not have predicted from where you started. Keter, 160 by 90 centimetres, a television set on a bench, two or three figures, a barely-there landscape: that is where the movement has reached so far.
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