White Cube Now Represents Tesfaye Urgessa, First Artist to Represent Ethiopia at the Venice Biennale

White Cube, which has six gallery locations around the world, announced today that it will now represent artist Tesfaye Urgessa, who splits his time between Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Nürtingen, Germany.

The gallery will open its first solo show for the artist at its Hong Kong location on September 9, featuring new paintings and works on paper. The gallery will also include Urgessa’s 2025 painting Fiber of grace (Schutz) 2 in its booth at Frieze Seoul next month.

Urgessa is known for his alluring figurative paintings that feature various Black figures often in enigmatic poses and spaces. Done at a large scale, at times measuring more than 8 feet wide, Urgessa begins his paintings by drawing them out on the floor before introducing oil to the canvas via a long brush.

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His art education began by watching his father reproduce church murals. He first studied at the Alle School of Fine Art and Design in Addis Ababa, before continuing his arts training at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart, Germany. In 2014, the year of his graduation, he won the Prize of the State Academy of Stuttgart.

Urgessa’s most prominent exhibition to date was the inaugural Ethiopian Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Titled “Prejudice and Belonging,” that presentation featured 18 paintings that Artforum described as “scenes of lost, anxious domesticity, where lean, fragmented bodies flash with bold strips of color on angular sofas and carpets.” When asked about them, Urgessa said, “It’s an invitation for the viewer to write their own story, thereby confronting their own prejudices and judgments.”

Since the Venice Biennale, he has had a solo show at the Sainsbury Center in Norwich, England, in 2025, and his first solo museum show in Asia will open at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing on August 9. His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, and the Uffizi Galleries in Florence.

“Urgessa’s distinctive figurative paintings deftly draw from Ethiopian and European art historical references to produce a wholly singular painterly style,” Ikenna Malbert, a London-based associate director of the gallery, told ARTnews in an email. “His work tackles pressing themes relating to migration, family and community, and an increasingly unsettled socio-political world. This converging of art histories to create a new visual language deeply resonates with White Cube’s wider programme.”