Exhibition · White Cube · Hong Kong
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. The exhibition’s titular painting The lingering Departure (2025) locates the drawn-out goodbye and its psychic reverberations within two intimate groupings of figures. Each centres on a woman who engages the viewer directly: one cradles a naked man against her chest; from the folds of the other’s cape protrudes a man’s head, while an infant figure rests on her knee. Enveloping them is a disproportionately large blue armchair whose expressionistic angularity lends it an almost architectural presence, appearing to morph into the body of a vehicle, ferrying its occupants towards an indeterminate elsewhere. A small door in the distance stands ajar, troubling the apparent domesticity of the scene and leaving uncertain whether the room depicted is a space of imminent departure or one, perhaps, already vacated. Urgessa refers to the recurring motif of the open door in his paintings as a ‘leap of faith’,1 invoking associations of spiritual enlightenment as well as surrender to the unknown. 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.…