White Cube has announced the representation of Tesfaye Urgessa (b. 1983, Ethiopia). Urgessa’s painting Fiber of grace (Schutz) 2 (2025) will go on view at the 2026 edition of Frieze Seoul. His debut exhibition with the gallery opens at White Cube Hong Kong on 9th September 2026, following his first solo museum presentation in Asia at Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing (until 9th August 2026).
Urgessa lives and works between Addis Ababa and Nürtingen, Germany, and was the first artist to represent Ethiopia in its inaugural national pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia in 2024. Describing himself firstly as a draughtsman, he begins each day with drawing before turning to painting on his studio floor, using a long brush to create densely peopled tableaux. Within his compositions, bodies appear pressed against one another, even enmeshed with their domestic surroundings.
Having grown up watching his father reproduce church murals, Urgessa trained in painting in Addis Ababa before continuing his studies at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart. Whilst in Germany, he encountered works of European art in person for the first time and came into direct contact with forms of racial and social difference that had been unfamiliar to him in Ethiopia.
Resisting any single or coherent narrative, Urgessa attributes his visual vocabulary to a broad range of influences spanning Ethiopian iconographic traditions and German Expressionism, as well as artists he has studied including Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, among many others. His paintings draw upon shifting registers of human experience, from passing observations and the wider news cycle, to conversations with friends and issues including migration – witnessed first-hand through his wife’s work with newly arrived migrants. Above all, Urgessa’s paintings embody his belief that ‘painting should imitate life itself’.
The exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong, titled ‘The Lingering Departure’ (9 September – 20 October 2026), includes new paintings and works on paper created over the past year which explore themes of migration, familial relations and community.
Urgessa has exhibited internationally, including the Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2026) and Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, UK (2025). His works are held in prestigious collections including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy; Uffizi Galleries, Florence, Italy and Cheng-Lan Foundation, Hong Kong and London.
About the artist
Tesfaye Urgessa is an Ethiopian contemporary artist whose expressive paintings explore identity, migration, memory and the human condition. Working primarily with large-scale figurative painting, Urgessa creates psychologically charged portraits in which fragmented bodies, layered surfaces and vivid colour convey the emotional complexities of displacement, belonging and personal transformation. His work balances technical precision with raw painterly energy, using the human figure as a vehicle for examining both individual experience and broader social realities.
Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Urgessa studied at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design before continuing his artistic education in Germany. Living between different cultures has profoundly shaped his practice, informing paintings that reflect on questions of home, cultural identity and the experience of navigating multiple worlds. His figures often occupy ambiguous spaces where realism gives way to abstraction, creating compositions that feel both intimate and universal.
Urgessa has exhibited internationally at leading galleries and institutions, establishing a distinctive voice within contemporary figurative painting. Through his powerful use of colour, gesture and form, he creates works that confront themes of migration, vulnerability and resilience while celebrating the enduring complexity of human identity. His paintings invite viewers to engage with the emotional and psychological dimensions of contemporary life, positioning Tesfaye Urgessa as one of the most compelling figurative painters of his generation.
