Tesfaye Urgessa presents ‘The Lingering Departure’, his first exhibition with the gallery since joining in August 2026. Bringing together paintings and works on paper created over the past year in Addis Ababa, and Stuttgart, Germany, the exhibition reflects on themes of migration, familial relationships and community, as reflections on an increasingly unsettled socio-political world.

Urgessa’s densely peopled tableaux take the human figure as their point of departure. Bodies appear pressed against one another, even enmeshed with their domestic surroundings, and resist settling into any single or coherent narrative. The figures remain in what the artist describes as ‘a state of metamorphosis’, at once altered and deconstructed. As the artist notes: ‘It’s not about what I want. It’s not about what the painting wants. It’s somewhere in the middle. We constantly negotiate.’

Urgessa’s paintings draw upon shifting registers of human experience, from passing observations and the wider news cycle, to conversations with friends and his wife’s work with newly arrived migrants. Above all, Urgessa’s paintings embody his belief that ‘painting should imitate life itself’.