Beatrice Wanjiku & Birhane Worede

Montague Contemporary is pleased to present Out of Office, a dual exhibition featuring new and recent works by Beatrice Wanjiku and Birhane Worede. Though formally distinct, both artists address the interior pressures of contemporary life—examining how bodies absorb, resist, and quietly process societal stress.

Across Worede’s portraits, figures recline, curl inward, or lie in states of deliberate withdrawal. Often positioned on couches or beds, his subjects appear momentarily unavailable—to labor, to expectation, to the incessant pull of digital engagement. In the exhibition’s largest work, a male figure slumps beneath the weight of his phone, exhausted by the demands of constant connectivity. These paintings do not dramatize collapse; instead, they insist on rest as a form of agency.

Wanjiku’s paintings move inward from the physical body toward the spiritual self. Her wraith-like figures—dark, suspended, and charged—embody the interior lives we are conditioned to suppress. Neither fully present nor absent, they hover between vulnerability and resistance, evoking the soul as a site of both injury and survival. In a moment defined by acceleration and externalization, Wanjiku’s work asks what remains unspoken, unseen, and unresolved within us.

Together, the works in Out of Office propose withdrawal not as escape, but as refusal. The exhibition considers rest, interiority, and spiritual reckoning as responses to contemporary conditions of burnout, surveillance, and emotional saturation. In a culture that rewards constant availability, these paintings suggest another register of being—one that is quiet, private, and deliberately unproductive.

Beatrice Wanjiku is a Kenyan visual artist whose distinctive canvases probe the human psyche, unraveling notions of reality, internal conflict, and existential presence through haunting, semi-abstract figures. Working between figuration and abstraction, her practice reflects on the emotional and psychological effects of social structures and lived experience.

Wanjiku received a diploma from the Buruburu Institute of Fine Arts in Nairobi in 2000 and lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work has been shown widely in international and institutional contexts, including presentations at Volta New York, 1:54 New York and London, The Ostrale 2015 in Dresden, Germany, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner at Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York (2015). At Montague Contemporary, she has participated in group exhibitions such as Catch a Fire (2021), We Contain Multitudes (2023), and Echoes and Edges (2025).

Birhane Worede’s evocative paintings explore the tension between physical and digital presence, portraying figures absorbed in the digital world, disengaged from their surroundings. His loose, washy compositions create timeless, formless spaces, where the only tangible elements are color, gesture, and surface. His process is deeply intuitive, moving between abstraction and figuration, allowing color to dictate form, often identifying his figures only in the final stages of creation.

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Worede graduated from the Ale School of Fine Art & Design, Addis Ababa University in 2021. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Chilli Art Projects in London, Circle Art Gallery’s "New Visions" in Nairobi, and Urevbu Contemporary in the United States. He has also contributed to public art projects such as “Art to Earth” with Addis Street Art in Ethiopia.