He was born in the walled city of Harar, Ethiopia in 1948. He studied at the Addis Ababa School of Fine Art from where he graduated in painting in 1973. During the school years (1970-1973), Tibebe and his friends formed the Sixteen Young Artist' Association that aimed at staging exhibitions around the country. Tibebe worked as an art instructor at the Medhane Alem Comprehensive High School in Harar from 1973 until 1980. In 1981 he moved to Addis Ababa, and worked as an Illustrator for Kuraz Publishing House until 1983. Since 1984 he has been working as a studio artist from his residence in Addis Ababa. Since 1981 he has numerous Solo exhibition in Ethiopia, Germany (Berlin), Canada (Winnipeg ,Toronto), USA (Washington), Spain (Madrid).

2010 - Lincoln County Public Library, Stanford, Kentucky, USA

 

"I like and appreciate how you are on a journey that is more than an artistic one. your evolution as an artist, I sense, is also emotional and spiritual. It is a search that follows your artistic path and the path of your whole being...

The effect of your recent work is quite mesmerizing and causes a viewer to stop, search and wonder."

Ray Dirks, Artist, Critic and Writer (Winnipeg, Canada) 2010.

"A life time dedication to painting"

The Ethiopian Herald,(Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) 2010.

"Tibebe Terffa is one of the most prominent, eccentric and deeply philosophical artists in Ethiopia. A full time artist, Tibebe spends most of his time in his house making art in his studio, listening to his vast collection of jazz and tending his eclectic garden, filled with all kinds of indigenous and imported plants from the different places he has traveled. One of my most exciting moments with Tibebe is walking around his garden listening to his enthusiastic description about each and every plant. His wooden house, built in the early 1960's, is one of a kind. From the front gate to his bathroom and every space in between including the rocks in his garden are adorned with Tibebe's colorful paintings. Some of his canvases are hung on his outside walls and a few have vines growing on them. Tibebe once told me that he enjoys watching the changing effects that time and the weather creates on the arts. He is a widower and a father of two daughters who are now young adults. The gentile manners and politeness of his children is a testament of his great parenting skill and generosity.

Tibebe's spirituality and humanistic personality are well-expressed in his art. They are positive and gentle expressions of his reaction to everything that is dear and close to him. I believe that he is one of the few artists I know whose life is deeply immersed in creating and living in the arts."

Meskerem Assegued, Director (Zome Contemporary Art Center, www.zcac.net, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) 2009.

"The Tibebe I know is a man of great integrity and a dear friend. There is also a wonderful, searching, and mystical spiritual quality about Tibebe. I think that comes through in his art as he evolves and plays with form in his paintings. It is a spirituality that cannot be catagorized specifically 100% any one religion. There is some mystery there..... something not quite known or pinpointed. I do not think he has not quite pinpointed what it is himself. But, he searches. that searching and willingness to reveal in the mystery of the spiritual came through in his art.

I appreciate the way his artistic course weaves from obvious depictions of life in Ethiopia that can be stylistically traced to some influence from his ancient birth culture to images that cannot be obviously traced to Ethiopia. This mix, to me, presents an artist who is routed in his homeland but who is always experimenting and growing without borders."

Ray Dirks, Artist, Writer, Curator (Winnipeg, Canada), 2002.

"His brush moves with a liquid violence when it touches the canvas. The tautness of the canvas is communicated by the soft brushing thunder, which accompanies his bolder strokes. At times his interaction with the paint can become so intense the air seems ionized, as if the colors being slung against the canvas are charged with the magic of a sorcerer...the man begins to dance with his colors, only it is not clear who is leading. The impish man laughs with delight at his canvas as it begins to show consciousness, as if he were seeing these twitches of life for the first time."

J.M.C. Price Dr. (Totonto, Canada), 2000.

"Tibebe has emerged as one of few uncontested contemporary artists of Ethiopia. Active in the spreading of the discipline's spiritual necessity to a wide range of his co-citizens, one can perceive him in the streets of the capital sharing his experience and experiments with young and old in an interminable selfless crusade."

Tewodros Tsegie Markos, Artist and Critic (Paris, France).