Tesfaye Urgessa sits down with White Cube gallery for insightful interview video
In the Studio: Tesfaye Urgessa | White Cube
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Ethiopian-born artist Tesfaye Urgessa reflects on the origins of his artistic journey and the creative influences that have shaped his practice. At the centre of his work is the human figure — a recurring and deeply intentional presence through which Urgessa seeks to capture the full spectrum of human emotion, rendered through his distinctive and powerfully expressive figurative paintings.
“From his studio in Nürtingen, Germany, Tesfaye Urgessa introduces the figurative paintings featured in his exhibition ‘The Lingering Departure’ at White Cube Hong Kong.
Drawing the viewer into oneiric scenarios in which distinctions of place and time appear to fold into one another, Tesfaye's works suspend compressed and fragmented bodies within spaces that resist ordinary logic.
Bringing together the artist’s most recent paintings, drawings and watercolours, ‘The Lingering Departure’ extends this indeterminacy into matters of movement and migration, taking the apparent contradiction between ‘lingering’ and ‘departure’ to evoke the liminality of transit. ‘Tesfaye Urgessa: The Lingering Departure’ is on view at White Cube Hong Kong until 20 October 2026.” - White Cube Gallery
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The figurative paintings of Ethiopian-born artist Tesfaye Urgessa suspend compressed and fragmented bodies within spaces that resist ordinary logic, drawing the viewer into oneiric scenarios in which distinctions of place and time appear to fold into one another. Bringing together the artist’s most recent paintings, drawings and watercolours, ‘The Lingering Departure’ extends this indeterminacy into matters of movement and migration, taking the apparent contradiction between ‘lingering’ and ‘departure’ to evoke the liminality of transit. Having spent over a decade moving between Addis Ababa and Germany, Urgessa regards departure as an ongoing condition: one that begins, as he describes it, in the anticipation of where one is going and persists through the memory of a place left behind
