Ebecho Muslimova
Ebecho Muslimova is a visual artist based between New York City and Mexico City, best known for her comic‑absurdist alter ego Fatebe, who features in her drawings, paintings, and works on paper.
Early life and education
Muslimova was born in 1984 in Makhachkala, Dagestan, RU. She moved to the United States and earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Cooper Union in New York City in 2010.Career and artistic practice
While studying sculpture at Cooper Union, Muslimova began drawing "Fatebe", a flat, cartoon‑like figure created during critiques as a form of emotional coping. Fatebe soon became central to her work, evolving from sketchbook drawings into staged paintings and performances on canvas and paper.Her works often depict Fatebe in surreal, slapstick or grotesque scenarios that blend humour, vulnerability, physical extremity, and abjection. Muslimova's visual language deliberately plays with flatness and graphic form, placing Fatebe in contradictory contexts that explore shame, pleasure, control, identity, anxiety, and the body’s limits.
Muslimova has described Fatebe not as a direct alter ego but as a “surrogate self” or mechanism for rendering internal experiences in a simplified yet emotionally resonant visual form.
Critical reception and themes
Muslimova’s work has been widely recognized for its distinctive blend of grotesque humor, physical exaggeration, and psychological complexity. A central figure in her practice is Fatebe, a cartoon-like alter ego whose elastic body and surreal scenarios serve as both comedic device and subversive commentary on embodiment.In a 2023 review of Fog at Magenta Plains, The New York Times critic Max Lakin described Fatebe as “a flat, fluid line drawing whose urges know no refusal,” noting she exists “somewhere between Cronenbergian body horror and complete liberation.” In an earlier 2021 review, Will Heinrich highlighted Scenes in the Sublevel at The Drawing Center, calling Fatebe “an unruly but oddly graceful figure” who appears in “narratives that combine slapstick, abjection and surrealism.”
In Frieze, Anthony Hawley interpreted Fatebe as “delighted with her uncanny ability to consume, contort, expel and become alternative forms,” positioning the character as a critique of bodily norms and patriarchal expectations. Flash Art emphasized the destabilizing spatial logic of Scenes in the Sublevel, while reviews in Hyperallergic and FAD Magazine compared Fatebe to slapstick and caricature figures, exploring themes of shame, vulnerability, and resistance through absurdity.