Montague Contemporary is pleased to present Out of office, a dual exhibition featuring 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.