Freya Tewelde Eritrean, b. 1977

Overview
Freya Tewelde
Freya Tewelde is a London-based interdisciplinary artist whose psychospiritual practice is rooted in painting and abstraction. She explores memory, ritual, and transformation through layered mark-making and ancestral inquiry, working primarily with powder pigment, oil sticks, and expansive colour fields that develop through accumulation, interruption, and return.
 
Born in Asmara, Eritrea and raised in Saudi Arabia, Tewelde draws on her diasporic experience, ancestral heritage, and background in the social sciences to examine the emotional and spiritual dimensions of identity and healing. 

 

Tewelde's deeply spiritual paintings draw from her Eritrean heritage and meditative practice, approaching each work as a perceptual enquiry. Works typically begin on the floor, where gravity, movement, and orientation shape the canvas as a spatial site of encounter rather than a framed image. Drawings, sketches, and sensory notes often act as early anchors, but the work is resolved through sustained engagement with surface, gesture, and chromatic balance. This process ensures her mark-making remains intuitive, allowing each painting to develop through accumulation, interruption, and return.

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Exhibitions
Biography
Freya Tewelde

Her work weaves together abstraction, cosmic symbolism and intuitive gesture to create spaces that feel both intimate and expansive. Working primarily with powder pigment and oil stick, Tewelde builds layered surfaces through accumulation, interruption and return, exploring threshold states, memory, transformation and spiritual autonomy. Born in Asmara, Eritrea and raised in Saudi Arabia, her diasporic experience and ancestral heritage remain central to the development of her practice.

 

Recent presentations and exhibitions include Geometry of Elsewhere, her solo exhibition at Gallery 1957, London (2026); Frieze Seoul with Gallery 1957 (2026); What The Mountain Has Seen at Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool (2025); Small is Beautiful 43 at Flowers Gallery, London (2025); and Dare to Journey into the Unknown at Bomb Factory Art Foundation, London (2024). Her work has also been exhibited internationally in Venice, Miami and Taipei.

 

Tewelde holds an MA in Fine Arts from Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, as well as a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice from University of the Arts London. Her work is held in private collections across the UK, Europe, the United States and Saudi Arabia.

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Works
Fragments Toward the Unseen