Ethiopian painter Tesfaye Urgessa has joined White Cube, placing an artist whose career has steadily moved between Addis Ababa, Germany and major international institutions within one of the contemporary art world’s most influential gallery networks.
White Cube announced Urgessa’s representation on 6 August 2026. His first exhibition with the gallery, The Lingering Departure, opens at White Cube Hong Kong on 9 September and runs until 20 October 2026, bringing together new paintings and works on paper made during the past year between Addis Ababa and Germany. Before then, Fiber of grace (Schutz) 2 (2025) will be presented by the gallery at Frieze Seoul, which runs from 2–5 September.
The representation arrives at a significant point in Urgessa’s career, but it is better understood as the continuation of a trajectory that has been developing for more than a decade than as a sudden market breakthrough.
Born in Addis Ababa in 1983, Urgessa studied painting at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design, where he trained under the influential Ethiopian painter Tadesse Mesfin. In 2009, he moved to Germany and continued his studies at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart. The transition became decisive for his practice: encountering European painting first-hand while negotiating his own experience of race, migration and foreignness in Germany gradually produced a visual language in which Ethiopian iconography and European art history exist alongside, rather than subordinate to, one another.
Urgessa’s earliest encounters with painting, however, came much closer to home. He has recalled watching his father reproduce Ethiopian church murals while growing up. That familiarity with religious imagery and the formal presence of the human figure would later intersect with his study of German Expressionism and painters including Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. The result is not straightforward quotation, but an increasingly recognisable figurative vocabulary built around compressed interiors, distorted bodies and psychologically charged relationships between figures.
His paintings are often densely populated. Bodies overlap, bend and press into one another, sometimes appearing almost inseparable from the rooms they inhabit. Faces, hands, limbs, furniture and fragments of domestic space accumulate without resolving themselves into a single narrative. Urgessa has described himself first as a draughtsman: drawing begins his working day before he moves towards larger paintings, often working on canvases laid across the studio floor with long brushes.
That emphasis on drawing helps explain the structural intensity of his compositions. Although the paintings can appear spontaneous, their figures are held together by assertive outlines and carefully managed bodily gestures. Everyday observations, conversations, news events and questions surrounding migration, race and belonging enter the work indirectly rather than as illustrations of specific political positions. In a 2024 interview, Urgessa explained that questions of race and identity emerge naturally from lived experience rather than being predetermined subjects imposed on individual paintings.
His international institutional profile began developing well before the current White Cube announcement. In 2018, the Uffizi Galleries presented Tesfaye Urgessa. Beyond at Florence’s Pitti Palace, bringing together 35 works spanning painting, drawing and monotype. Urgessa subsequently donated a self-portrait to the Uffizi collection, an unusually significant institutional acknowledgement for an Ethiopian contemporary painter at that stage of his career.
The most consequential moment came in 2024, when Urgessa became the first artist to represent Ethiopia at the Venice Biennale, appearing in the country’s inaugural national pavilion. Curated by poet and broadcaster Lemn Sissay, Prejudice and Belonging was presented at Palazzo Bollani during the Biennale’s 60th edition. The exhibition placed Urgessa’s long-standing concerns with displacement, identity and belonging within a Biennale itself organised under Adriano Pedrosa’s theme Foreigners Everywhere.
Rather than introducing Urgessa to these questions, Venice amplified concerns already embedded in his practice. His paintings have developed through the experience of moving between cultural contexts: Ethiopia providing one set of pictorial, religious and social references, Germany another. His significance lies partly in his refusal to resolve those histories into a neat hybrid identity. Instead, his figures frequently occupy psychologically unstable spaces in which intimacy and estrangement can exist simultaneously.
That approach was examined on a larger scale earlier this year in Primordial Paths, Urgessa’s first solo museum exhibition in Asia at Beijing’s Red Brick Art Museum. The exhibition brought together more than 60 paintings produced since 2019 and extended his investigation of migration, displacement, memory and cultural identity.
White Cube’s forthcoming Hong Kong exhibition develops these concerns further. The Lingering Departure centres on migration, familial relationships and community against what the gallery describes as an increasingly unsettled social and political landscape. The title is particularly appropriate for an artist whose work repeatedly considers departure not as a single event, but as a condition capable of reshaping memory, relationships and ideas of home long after physical movement has ended.
Urgessa’s work is now held in collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Castello di Rivoli, Uffizi Galleries and Cheng-Lan Foundation, while recent institutional exhibitions include the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich and Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing.
Joining White Cube substantially expands the commercial infrastructure surrounding that institutional recognition. With spaces in London, New York, Paris, Hong Kong and Seoul and a significant presence at major international fairs, the gallery gives Urgessa access to a collecting and museum network operating across several of contemporary art’s most active markets.
Yet the more interesting story is not simply that an Ethiopian artist has entered a major international gallery roster. Urgessa’s career demonstrates how an artistic language grounded in Addis Ababa, transformed through migration and developed through prolonged engagement with several art histories can circulate internationally without becoming reducible to a single geography.
After Venice, Florence and Beijing, White Cube represents another expansion of that trajectory. But Urgessa’s paintings remain concerned with something less easily institutionalised: how bodies carry memory, how belonging becomes unstable, and how the ordinary spaces of family and domestic life can contain the larger pressures of migration, history and identity.
