White Cube has announced representation of Ethiopian painter and Artsy Vanguard alum Tesfaye Urgessa. The gallery will present his work at Frieze Seoul 2026, where his painting Fiber of grace (Schutz) 2 (2025) will be on view, ahead of his debut solo exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong, opening September 9, 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 the Venice Biennale in 2024. His first solo museum presentation in Asia is currently on view at Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, through August 9, 2026.
Describing himself primarily as a draughtsman, Urgessa begins each day with drawing before turning to painting on his studio floor, working with a long brush to build densely populated compositions in which bodies appear pressed against one another, at times enmeshed with their domestic surroundings.
His visual vocabulary draws on Ethiopian iconographic traditions and German Expressionism, as well as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, whose work he has studied closely. He attributes this breadth to a formative encounter with European art after relocating to Germany to study at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart, an experience that also brought him into contact with forms of racial and social difference new to him. Migration, familial relations, and community are recurring concerns in his work, shaped in part by his wife’s work with newly arrived migrants.
In 2023, Urgessa was selected in The Artsy Vanguard, the annual selection of the most promising artists working today. “I want my figures to have almost an emotional vulnerability,” he told writer Emily Steer in an interview.
The White Cube Hong Kong exhibition will bring together new paintings and works on paper made over the past year. Urgessa’s works are held in institutional collections including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; and the Uffizi Galleries, Florence.
