Sutueal Bekele Althe was born in Addis Abeba, Ehtopia, in 1974. He began his career as an artist from an early age painting portraits of his family and relatives in his home city. From 1989-1991 he studied for his Diploma in Fine Art at the Addis Abeba Fine Art College. In late 1991 he held his first solo exhibition at the French Cultural Centre in Addis Abeba. Although only sixteen his technically assured references to the compositional elements of mosaics and cubism, combined with his messages for humanity and life, awarded him critical success. In 1992 he relocated to Nairobi , Kenya where he held major solo exhibitions at the Watatu Gallery and Contemporary East African Gallery, 1995; National Museum of Kenya, 1997; French Cultural Centre, Nairobi , 1999 and the United Nations Educational Headquarters for Kenya , 1999. During this time Sutueal also toured solo exhibitions to Tanzania , Uganda and South Sudan . In 1998 his commission for the United Nations Peace Programme was presented to the United Nations Headquarters in Geneva , where it is on display in the Department of Peace and Education. Sutueal’s studio in Nairobi ’s Refugee Camp Kakuma was visited at this time by a delegation of United Nations representatives and  Australian and Kenyan government ministers.  In March, 1999 he arrived in Australia . 

Sutueal’s art is an exploration of his identity and culture. The fusion of his traditional, Ethiopian mosaic art and its meticulous technique and specific detail, with the visual energy and compositional qualities of the relatively modern cubist movement, are distinctive of who he is and how he communicates through paint. It is the uniqueness of approach that demonstrates a potent ability to question the role of the artist as the explicit bearer of a nation’s cultural identity.