Tesfaye Urgessa: Roots of Resilience

The Sainsbury Centre presents Roots of Resilience: Tesfaye Urgessa, a new exhibition by Tesfaye Urgessa (b.1983, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) featuring a powerful new series of paintings reflecting on cultural conflict and the refugee crisis, and the fragility of the human mind, which have been created in dialogue with the museum’s collection.

The exhibition is a moving and urgent response to war and displacement – in 2024, the number of people forcibly displaced rose to 122.6 million globally, an increase of 11.5% compared to the previous year – and the enduring trauma carried in the human body, and features as part of the Sainsbury Centre’s Can We Stop Killing Each Other? season

Influenced by neo-expressionism and the London school, Tesfaye Urgessa’s figurative paintings explore the politics of race and identity. For Urgessa, painting is more than a visual language – it is a critical act of witnessing and capturing the scars of conflict, the realities of displacement and the environmental crises reshaping our world. His work moves fluidly between figuration and abstraction, drawing on the emotional depth of Lucian Freud (1922–2011) and the visceral intensity of Francis Bacon (1909-1992), while interrogating themes of identity, war, diaspora and belonging.

Roots of Resilience follows a residency undertaken by Urgessa at the Sainsbury Centre in March 2025, where he was inspired by works from the museum’s global collection, such as Pablo Picasso’s Woman combing her Hair (1906), Henry Moore’s Mother and Child (1949), and a wooden female figure with child from the Baule people of Côte d’Ivoire, among others.

The paintings featured in Roots of Resilience refigure the human body not as broken, but as bearing dignity, defiance, and the enduring capacity to heal – reflecting not only personal and collective trauma, but also our potential for empathy, endurance, and transformation. His figures bear witness to violence – scarred yet never defined by their wounds. Rooted in his own diasporic experience, these paintings confront the brutal realities of war, forced migration, and exile, while also reflecting the psychological toll of environmental collapse. In a world shaped by conflict and climate crisis, Roots of Resilience: Tesfaye Urgessa becomes both elegy and act of resistance.

Tesfaye Urgessa, said: I want to paint the human figure in its totality – scars and resilience, fear and strength.

The exhibition forms part of the Sainsbury Centre’s latest exhibition season, Can We StopKilling Each Other?, which asks how artists can help us confront violence and imagine pathways to healing and repair. Urgessa’s contribution is raw, striking, and profoundly necessary – reminding us that resilience does not lie in returning to the past, but in the radical act of reimagining the future.

In Roots of Resilience the human figure becomes both mirror and vessel, reflecting not only personal and collective suffering, but also our potential for empathy, endurance, and transformation. Here, the body becomes a quiet site of introspection; a space where survival becomes testimony, and where art asks us to see each other again as human beings with families, friendships, and the need to be treated with dignity, love and care. This, perhaps, is how we begin to build lasting peace so that, one day, we may truly stop killing each other.

Can We Stop Killing Each Other? is the latest in an innovative series of investigative exhibitions by the Sainsbury Centre following its radical relaunch in 2023, when it became the first museum in the world to formally recognise the lifeforce of art, enabling people to build relationships with living art across its dynamic museum landscape.

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