Selome Muleta

born 1992 in Ziway, Ethiopia.

Selome Muleta's paintings stage the domestic interior as a site of self-determination. Her figures — women reclined in chairs, curled in bathtubs, folded into colour-laden rooms — are caught in solitary acts that public life often denies them: reading, resting, thinking, withdrawing from view. In her hands, the private becomes a space of freedom, a register whose political weight sharpens in societies where women's lives in public remain narrowed by convention. Rendered in translucent washes of crimson, green, and warm earth, the bodies thin into their surroundings until the line between figure and ground — person and room — is repeatedly given up and renegotiated.

"Spaces form part of us and vice versa." – Selome Muleta

Her work has been exhibited at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town; The Africa Centre, London; CFHILL, Stockholm; the Alliance Ethio-Française, Addis Ababa; the Guramayne Art Centre, Addis Ababa; and the Fendika Art Gallery, Addis Ababa. Her paintings are held in the collections of the Denver Art Museum; Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo; and Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, Cardiff.

In 2024, Muleta was a finalist for the Norval Sovereign African Art Prize, with her work presented at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town. In summer 2025, Jan Kaps mounted Motion, her first solo exhibition with the gallery, followed by a duo presentation of her work at Art Basel Paris that autumn. In spring 2026, her solo exhibition at b-side, the curatorial program at ROH Projects, Jakarta, was curated by 47 Canal.