Tesfaye Urgessa /
The Lingering Departure /
Sep 9 – Oct 20, 2026 /
White Cube Hong Kong
50 Connaught Road, Central Hong Kong
+852 2592 2000
Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 7pm
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.
