In the densely peopled tableaux of Ethiopian-born artist Tesfaye Urgessa, the human figure provides the principal means through which the artist tests the expressive limits of painting. Built through regions of deep pigment, bodies cluster and crowd the pictorial field, pressed against one another and enmeshed within domestic or dreamlike surrounds. Compositional anchors – among them lamps, rugs, boots, open books and doorways left ajar – recur across the paintings, offering, by the artist’s own account, moments of emotional reprieve. While Urgessa attributes his visual vocabulary to a broad compass of influences spanning Ethiopian iconographic traditions, German Expressionism and the legacy of the School of London, his practice subsumes these various lineages into a painterly language singular unto itself and in constant transformation. The artist likens his body of work to views of ‘the same mountain from different directions’,1 each painting offering another vantage in his attempt to give form to the many, shifting registers of human experience.
Beginning each canvas with the figure, Urgessa allows the painting’s orbital elements – its objects and environments – to emerge in response to the demands of the composition, often arising from images and encounters that linger in his memory and resurface, in altered form, upon the canvas. He frequently initiates his works on the studio floor, using a long brush to lay down marks in oil, denying himself a close view of the composition in order to suspend premature judgement and allow unforeseen relationships to emerge between the work’s constituent parts. Long before encountering painting formally through his studies in Addis Ababa and, subsequently, in Stuttgart, Germany, he grew up watching his father reproduce church paintings and work from photographs of people from the neighbourhood as the basis for large-scale paintings. He describes himself foremost as a draughtsman, beginning each day with drawing before turning to painting. Painting, for him, resists completion: sensing a canvas nearing resolution, he deliberately introduces ‘a different chaos’2 to prolong his engagement with it. Drawing, by contrast, operates by a different economy: each work is begun and finished within a single sitting, rarely revisited, and serves as a point of return when a painting’s irresolution grows wearing.
Urgessa left Ethiopia in 2009, having trained at Addis Ababa University’s Alle School of Fine Arts and Design, to continue his studies at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart, residing in Germany for the next 13 years before returning to live in Ethiopia. In Germany, he encountered works of European art he had previously known only through study, while coming into direct contact with forms of racial and social difference that had been unfamiliar to him in Ethiopia. Though frequently compressed into close pictorial proximity, Urgessa’s figures seldom dialogue with one another. Instead, he insists, they are ‘ready to be in contact with the audience’.3 In their massed presence and frontal address, they invoke the sacred figures of Ethiopian Orthodox iconography, whose large, arresting eyes engage with the viewer’s own as a reminder of the all-seeing divine. Urgessa’s figures similarly impress upon the beholder a discomfiting sense of being looked upon; the viewer, in looking back, ceases to be a detached observer and becomes, instead, a participant in the encounter.
Initiated in 2016, Urgessa’s ongoing series ‘No Country for Young Men’ arose from what he recalls as a period of intense attention to the circumstances around him, prompted by reports at the time of unprecedented global displacement, by the realities of migration he was witnessing firsthand through his wife’s work alongside migrants, and by what he describes as a certain ‘pulse and pressure’4 that would not leave him, even in sleep. In the diptych No Country for Young Men 31 (2024), numerous near-identical nude male figures are arranged across the canvas in alternating directions, their eyes variously closed or shielded behind raised arms. The painting’s lower register is given over to open books and a table upon which a single hand hovers a pen above a page, alluding to the bureaucratic procedures that accompany forced transit. Wary of being received solely as an artist who ‘paints about migration’,5 Urgessa locates the series within his broader enquiry into the conditions by which one human being might come to comprehend the experience of another. Most people, he notes, already possess knowledge of lives and circumstances beyond their own, yet remain at a remove from them, not for want of information, but of experience: ‘a missing key’,6 he suggests, that painting might approach.
Reflecting the open-ended nature of Urgessa’s artistic endeavour, many of his compositions resist settling into any single, legible or coherent narrative. Figures and objects coexist within the same composition without being asked to cooperate. It is likely this refusal of pictorial coherence that has led many to draw surrealist associations with his work. In The Strange Host (2022), for example, the artist makes direct reference to Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey (1938) within a composition otherwise populated by dreaming figures, disembodied heads, domestic furnishings and a distant seascape. A similarly oneiric register permeates The Dormant Dream (2026), which presents a densely inhabited interior scene in which numerous figures are rendered at irreconcilable scales, while the room’s upper register appears to dissolve into a vast, arid landscape. Urgessa attributes this apparent strangeness to painting’s unique capacity to generate its own logic. There is no gravity, no fixed scale or perspective to which its elements must answer. By way of example, Urgessa notes that a figure painted at the top of a composition will not fall; nor, on the flat surface of the canvas, is one body ever truly ‘behind’ another. ‘There are different laws in a painting’.7
For a number of years, Urgessa worked closely with his daughters in the studio, inviting them to paint alongside him and leaving them free to make their own interventions within his paintings. This collaboration is indicative of the openness with which Urgessa allows what presents itself to enter into and inform his work. His paintings draw as readily upon his lived experience, memories and passing observations as they do upon the news cycle, conversations with friends, as well as the artists he has studied. Among the artists he repeatedly returns to are Lucian Freud, for the seriousness of his commitment to painting, Philip Guston, for the spontaneity and fluency of his figures, and Cecily Brown, for the vitality of her brushwork. No figure or influence constitutes a fixed point of reference, however. As the artist changes and his experiences evolve, so too do the paintings. It is, as he puts it, ‘a never-ending event […] I’m just following behind and I keep recording’.8
Tesfaye Urgessa (b. 1983, Addis Ababa) lives and works between Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Nürtingen, Germany. He studied at the Alle School of Fine Art and Design, Addis Ababa (2006) and Staatlichen Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart, Germany (2009–14). Notable solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2026); The Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, UK (2025); the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Italy (2024); and the Uffizi Galleries, Florence, Italy (2018). Urgessa’s works are held in the permanent collections of Brooklyn Museum, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy; Uffizi Galleries, Florence Italy; Cheng-Lan Foundation, Hong Kong SAR and London; Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart, Germany; Rubell Museum, Miami, Florida; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany; and The Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden, Marrakech, Morocco.
1–8 Artist conversation, unpublished, June 2026
