Nirit Takele remembers her first breakfast in Israel vividly. “I was shocked how white everything was. Bowls of what I now know is labneh, quark, sour cream, cottage cheese and other soft and hard white cheeses. I couldn’t understand why the food had no colour.”
It was 1991 and Takele was six years old. Twenty four hours earlier she’d eaten a colourful breakfast in Addis Ababa. She, her parents and three siblings, the youngest just two months old, had left their home and farm in Kunzla, a village in northern Ethiopia, travelled by boat across Lake Tan and then walked for four days to the country’s capital where Jews were gathering for Operation Solomon, the covert Israeli military operation which airlifted 14,200 people out of Ethiopia to their promised land in 36 hours.

So her first Israeli breakfast was eaten in a hotel, one of the many in Jerusalem where the Ethiopian Jews stayed before being moved to absorption centres across Israel.  The Takele family was sent to one in Rehovot and from there to a new home and life in Ofakim, a then economically depressed town in southern Israel. New factories and the hi-tech industry have since moved to Ofakim, but as recently as 2008 Haaretz newspaper reported that nearly one third of its inhabitants were “supported by the welfare department and hundreds of families receive aid, including food.”
Thirty years after little Nirit Takele  arrived in Ofakim, the now feted Israeli artist is on a visit to London, a city where she can start the day with breakfast foods in every hue and from every corner of the globe. She is here for her solo show The Space Between Us, the inaugural exhibition of a gallery in the heart of Fitzrovia. And it would be fair to say that the colour white continues to preoccupy her.
“The people in my paintings are as dark as me,” she tells me in the white cube gallery set up by Rakeb Sile and Mesai Haileleul of Addis Fine Art, who, five years ago, also established Ethiopia’s first gallery for contemporary art. “When I studied history of art at college I was struck by the gap between my expectations and the curriculum, the canon. I scanned the paintings of the old masters for people who looked like me and when I found some, which wasn’t often, they were invariably on the edge of the picture, and usually a servant or a slave. I didn’t feel represented at all.”
Takele’s cylindrical figurative paintings — reminiscent of the rounded forms of Fernand Leger, a forerunner of pop art, but influenced by Michelangelo’s sculptures and Hockney’s colourfulness too, she says — are also a celebration of the Beta Israel, as her community is called in Israel. 
This community of 150,000 or so can feel maligned and marginalised, she explains. “I haven’t personally experienced any racism in Israel and the community elders mostly still feel grateful to the state for bringing them here. But the younger generation often feels on the edge of things. The big, muscular Black men and women in my paintings are a response to this hurt. I want to show Beta Israel’s inner, heroic strength.”
That hurt came to a head in 2015 after a video emerged of an Ethiopian-born soldier being beaten up by a policeman. Damas Pakada was on day-release from the army when he was stopped by an officer cordoning off an area after a suspicious object had been found. Within hours of the footage airing on national television Pakada was out of jail and the policeman dismissed from the force. But the incident set off a string of protests from Ethiopian Israelis for whom the assault symbolised years of unfair targeting and heavy-handed treatment by the police.
The shocking incident — “we are not talking a civilian here, Damas  was in army uniform, serving the country, when he got that beating” — also gave Takele her artistic calling. She made a huge painting of the assault for her final degree show at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, in Ramat Gan. Her teachers gave her almost a whole wall on which to display the work which sold immediately. It was 2015, she was 30 years old and her career as an artist had begun.
But she had got to Shenkar College almost by accident. After her army service, which she chose to do at a West Bank military checkpoint and where her good friend died when a Palestinian slit his throat  — “I wanted to meet the Palestinians about whom I’d heard so much first hand, I left the army thinking we should respect but also suspect them” — she slid into a series of dead-end jobs. 
“I’ve always loved drawing and painting, but it was a private thing. I used to hang my pencil drawings and charcoal sketches, my paintings done in cheap acrylics, on my bedroom walls. I had no idea that art could be a career, that other people might want to see my work.”
Even at the age of 25 when she hired an art teacher for an hour a week as respite from her “soul-killing” job in a factory, she still had no real idea where it might lead her. 
“After ten art lessons, something shifted in me. I knew that I had to choose a new path, I just didn’t know what it should be. I made an appointment with a careers advisor to try and find out. I said I loved art but that I also wanted to be financially independent. Should I do a course in business studies, maybe?”
The careers advisor wasn’t much help. “She said it didn’t really matter what I studied because there was no guarantee I’d end up working in my chosen subject. The important thing was to get study something, to get a qualification.”
Feeling a bit nonplussed, Takele left and made her way to the bus stop. As she waited for an Egged bus out of Ramat Gan she looked up and saw the words Shenkar Art Department writ large on a nearby building. “And I thought, well, if there are no guarantees, I might as well try and study something I actually love.”
And now the art world loves her.  Since she sold her graduate show painting of Damas Pakada (now a decorated officer in the IDF’s cyber unit) her work has been shown at the Israel Museum, Haifa Museum, the Negev Museum of Art and the Fresh Paint Art Fair. She was the winner of Sotheby’s 2017 Under the Hammer Prize and this is her second European solo exhibition with Addis Fine Art. 
The giant, muscled Black bodies depicted in the 14 paintings, which all sold within a week, continue to portray the Beta Israel — “a beauty and strength that isn’t always recognised,” she says carefully — but also explore the social unrest triggered by the pandemic and the rise of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement around the world in the past 18 months.
Of particular inspiration were the BLM protester dubbed naked Athena who last July confronted Portland police wearing only a face mask and beanie and, two weeks later, the Israeli who climbed a menorah statue near the Knesset and removed her shirt. In Human Pyramid, a limp female figure, her breasts exposed, lies on top of a pyramid of intertwined men, the Hebrew words for ‘art or die’, a popular slogan in the Israeli art scene, inscribed on her chest.
Takele is now at the centre of this scene. When she was a student she prepared her graduate show in the bomb shelter of her block of flats, and worked throughout her degree — in a supermarket, as a face painter and latterly as a waitress in the café of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. “It was just nice just to work in a building dedicated to art,” she says. Now she has a studio in her home in Tel Aviv, where she works full-time. 

Many students with whom she studied at Shenkar, where she was the only Black student on the course, are not working artists. “I feel very lucky,” she tells me. “Lucky that I get to represent my community on canvas and proud to be an Israeli artist. There are problems in our society, but I’d never want to give the impression that I am anything other than a proud Jew and a proud Israeli.”