Tesfaye Urgessa

The exhibition’s titular painting The lingering Departure (2025) locates the drawn-out goodbye and its psychic reverberations within two intimate groupings of figures. Each centres on a woman who engages the viewer directly: one cradles a naked man against her chest; from the folds of the other’s cape protrudes a man’s head, while an infant figure rests on her knee. Enveloping them is a disproportionately large blue armchair whose expressionistic angularity lends it an almost architectural presence, appearing to morph into the body of a vehicle, ferrying its occupants towards an indeterminate elsewhere. A small door in the distance stands ajar, troubling the apparent domesticity of the scene and leaving uncertain whether the room depicted is a space of imminent departure or one, perhaps, already vacated. Urgessa refers to the recurring motif of the open door in his paintings as a ‘leap of faith’,¹ invoking associations of spiritual enlightenment as well as surrender to the unknown.

Urgessa develops his distinctive painterly idiom through a confluence of artistic influences, ranging from Ethiopian Orthodox iconography and German Expressionism to the legacy of the School of London. Rather than settling into a single stylistic register, these disparate lineages are absorbed into a visual language that remains befittingly syncretic: recurrent domestic objects and threshold motifs appear alongside metamorphic forms, drawing on the permissive logic of dreams to accommodate improbable conjunctions and transformations. In Safe slumber (2025), the central figure moves on all fours, his head torqued backwards to face the child asleep on his back. An angular table rises and slopes around them like a sand dune, giving rise to a mirage-like conflation of furniture and landscape that reinforces the composition’s spatial instability. Elsewhere, bodies materialise in various stages of completion, while a pair of anthropomorphic quadrupeds tread the clouds above. This vision in the sky lends the painting a spiritual and mythic register reminiscent of Ethiopian church paintings, while Urgessa’s signature chromatic earthiness tethers the image resolutely to the corporeal world.

The errant limbs, heads and torsos that recur throughout Urgessa’s work speak to forms of dislocation both geographic and psychic, as well as to the ever-shifting construction of identity that movement between places can engender. In Dreaming about the Self (2025), a figure balances on their coccyx, knees drawn to their chest, while disembodied heads and limbs gather nearby like fragments from a repertoire of possible selves. Their eyes meet the viewer’s with an unyielding directness, appearing to guard against any straightforward attempt to fix them within a singular or stable identity. Having become more acutely aware of racial difference during the 13 years he spent in Germany after moving there from Ethiopia, Urgessa deploys the confrontational gaze, as well as the countervailing gesture of closed or covered eyes, as a means of challenging the impulse to define his figures. A similar dynamic animates his portraits: small, square canvases in which faces meet the viewer square-on yet remain formally unresolved, their features expressionistically fragmented, while the shadows behind them subtly point to the contingent effects of time and place upon the self.

Without ceding any measure of the intimacy or intensity that characterises the artist’s paintings, a different temporality governs Urgessa’s drawings and watercolours, both of which he produces at speed and with an immediacy that counters the prolonged processes of revision he affords his paintings. In the oil and graphite drawing The Whisper (2026), a figure bends double against their own shadow, which, seemingly possessed of a head of its own, kisses them on the ear, taking on the role of a lover. A similar ambiguity recurs in Lend me your vision (2026), which depicts two women who appear to either merge or split at the shoulders, while one shields the other’s face with her hand. His watercolours (all 2026), meanwhile, render figures through discrete fields of umber, cream and plum brown, their forms seeming to hover, adrift, on the surface of the paper. This recent series arose out of circumstance, while Urgessa was travelling in Beijing and Hong Kong without his usual materials or access to a studio. Compelled to continue working, he turned instead to his children’s watercolours and drawing paper. Made in a single sitting, these works preserve what the artist calls the ‘intensity of the present moment’² – a state, he suggests, that resides precariously in the interval between past and future.

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.