TESFAYE URHESSA: The Lingering Departure

War in Play, 2025

White Cube is pleased to present The Lingering Departure, an exhibition of Tesfaye Urgessa, in Hong Kong.

9 September – 20 October 2026

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.

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.

Of what once was, 2026

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.

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.