Graduation
After my graduation from the State Art Academy in Tbilisi in 1982, I was taken in the special creative programme, that was under the support of the USSR Central Academy of Art and Science. A regular review commission from Moscow accompanied by a delegation of the professors of the academy, were visiting the students´ studios to evaluate our work. While trying to clean my atelier for this distinguished delegation, a door that was laying on two chairs and which I used as a pallet accidentally fell upside down. All the colours flooded on the floor. I decided to clean the mess with a big broom. When I saw the amount of colour that was spilled, I fell sorry and decided to use it as a ground on my project´s painting, that was standing half way painted and pictured –fully in line with the Soviet Central Body´s guidelines- some figurative scenery. I put the colour on the still empty space of the canvas and after I looked at both the realistic painted and this newly added abstract colourful spot, I made a choice in favour of the abstraction. I then covered the whole canvas with abstract painting. I liked my first abstract painting and when the commission came in I was very proud of my newly created work. However they were not pleased by it. I was ordered to leave my studio immediately. Perhaps I should have been sad about loosing my place in this prestigious programme, but I was not. I had found something that made me happy.
Mid 80s Abstraction
Now making abstract paintings, for which there was no audience still in Soviet Georgia, I decided to move to Moscow and join the avant-garde artists movement there. Soon, and while the Soviet regime was loosening its grip on what was allowed in the arts, I was able to get a first Georgian abstract painters exhibition organized. This show received a lot of attention both from the locals as well as foreigners that had started coming in to Moscow in larger numbers, and turned out to be a great success. After this, it became possible to make a first-ever abstract exhibition in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1987. In the meantime, I received invitations to exhibit in France and Germany.
It was also in this period that I started experimenting with installation art and made my first installation "Perestroika man", which I dedicated to all the excitement that was happening at that time, while being critical that the those leading the changes were very much the products of Soviet history and limited thereby in their capacity to bring about the envisioned change that.
1989 – Move to Paris
I arrived in Paris, France in 1989 at the invitation of Gallery Felly. This was my first-ever stay outside of the Soviet Union and it would be a long time before I would return to my roots. In this period, I took part in various exhibitions in Paris, Strassbourg and other places. I was part of what was referred to as a post-Soviet wave in the arts that responded to a keen interest in Western Europe in arts from this part of the world, that had so far been quite isolated from interaction with the West.
New Start
While I was now living in Paris, I had been invited by the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany to a meeting to discuss a Georgian show. On my trip to Kassel traveling on my Soviet passport, I was stopped at the French-German border at Aachen and arrested, handcuffed and taken off from the train, and told I could not enter the German territory. My passport was stamped "Zuruckgewiesen" (Rejected). After contacting the museum, I was allowed to continue my trip to Kassel. When I got back to Paris, I decided to make a painting (object) of my useless Soviet passport wrapped as a precious present with a beautiful shiny ribbon accompanied by a painting of the stamped "rejected" page, to lament the fact that as a post-Soviet citizen, from a country that was now recognized as a new democracy, I was still not free to move and treated as a second-rate creature.
Germany
Following my stay in Paris, I moved to Germany in 1990. I was invited to be an artist in residence for a year by Museum Fridericianum in Kassel. I was provided with a very large studio space in which I produced numerous and now very large-scale paintings. In this period I became more and more engaged in environmental and socio-political issues, which I reflected in my works. I made several paintings depicting endangered species and commented in Georgian script on the human impact that threatens their survival. During this time I exhibited my works amongst others in the Museum Fridericianum, the Kunsthalle in Kiel, the Museum St. Wendel, and the DuMont Kunsthalle, Cologne.
After my year as an artist in residence at the Museum Fridericianum, I moved to Cologne, Germany. While I continued painting large size socio-politically influenced paintings, I also started serial productions and increasingly used installation art as an artistic language to comment on current socio-political affairs and the characteristics of human nature.
It was during this period that installations like "the World Wonders", "Crusade number III", "Last Supper","The Container", video installations like "Frozen Time or Desire to Fly",and "The Circle of Life" (installations) and objects like "Good News", "All Jonson", "Superstars", "Das Gewissen" (The Conscience), "the Angel" and "This Generation", the latter which was exhibited in the COBRA Museum in the Netherlands, (objects) came about. In 1996 I received the Ursula Blickle award for best Installation artist with Crusade III.
World Wonders
“World Wonders” 1991 is a series of eight paintings in acrylic on canvas, each 197 x 145 cm. The cycle of the “World Wonders” took form at the beginning of 1991, as a spontaneous reaction to the events of the first Gulf War. The first seven paintings portray the seven, manmade world wonders of classical antiquity as they could have looked like in their full glory before their destruction by human kind. The eighth painting pictures the world itself. On top of these images text fragments are running. For those able to read the script, the words do not have a meaning. However, those for whom the words have meaning, cannot read the script. The texts (in Georgian script) give the daily programming of two major German TV stations, including their reporting on the events in Iraq and Kuwait in the first seven days and the very last day of the Gulf War 1.
Leading up to the war there was a lot of speculation as to how this war could have severe consequences, in terms of the burning oil fields and their effect on the environment and how this could potentially lead to the destruction of (the wonder of human life on) the planet. However once the war started, nothing really changed. The TV stations dedicated a special morning section to the events in the Gulf, but by and large people just continued life as they used to, being “fed” their daily menu of talkshows, TV series, films etc. by the media.
Monday 14.01.1991
Tuesday 15.01.1991
Wednesday 16.01.1991 (day when the war started)
Thursday 17.01.1991
Friday 18.01.1991
Saturday 19.01.1991
Sunday 20.01.1991
Thursday 28.02.1991 (day when the war ended)
Transition
For a while I withdrew from making art and spent my time mostly reading books, particularly psychology and philosophy books, with the main aim to find out why I should be making art in the first place, when everything has already been done, and what is was that I was looking for or what I could offer through my works. Contemplating these larger questions, I became drawn again to exploring abstractionism in my work, because of its reflective and meditative nature which fit very well with my personal experience and the way I had matured as an artist. Over time these explorations led to the develo3pment of various minimalist abstract series, including "White Curtain", "One Liners", and "Moving Stills I, II and III".
The Late 90s - White Courtain
“The inspiration for this series originated from the white curtain that covers my window. Beyond that curtain: the outside world. I can’t see the outside world because of the white curtain. But I know it is there. I sense what is there or could be there. And when I am watching this, the process of painting starts. Each of the works in this series is an absolute minimal beginning. Because the beginning contains everything. It’s not in the end that something is happening. If not this beginning, if not the existence of one point, this one singular yellow square, or red square or form, this structure, this one and it’s shadow -so it means there are already two tones, sometimes even three, four, ten, meaning that from one point you already have a lot- It all lays within the beginning. The works in this series are elementarily holistic and unitary. They portray a profound compository simplicity. Whereas contemporary life dictates that we are surrounded by an abundance of details, looking at this abundance, this chaos at once, means that one sees almost nothing. On the other hand in these works, in which there is almost nothing to see, it is here one starts to see everything. In the emptiness of these works, one never knows what is behind this emptiness. Behind this emptiness is your idea. And if you are intelligent enough, than with your mind and ingenuity you will transcend this emptiness and have a comprehensive, fulfilling experience. I love this quietness, to go inside the color of a painting, this meditative quality. When you are standing in front of a painting, looking at it –I found out- it gives the best satisfaction for me. Every time I look at my window, I know that this is the same window, and that it will never, never change. Yet I see difference every day, not only because the color or light might change, but because my ideas change. I am thinking differently today and looking at this window, I see something different.”
Early 2000s – One-Liners
In a certain space and its specific time, movement is represented by a line. The line is a substance of form. Time creates form and has its own speed. In time, speed constructs rhythm. If one imagines history as an abstractical form, it consists of different rhythmical ongoing movements. Notwithstanding its changibility and similarity, it never repeats. In the painting this movement starts in eternity and moves towards infinity. Similarly, if one considers the line of the horizon, this horizontal line by itself doesn’t provide us the possibility to imagine earth as it is in its completeness. This constitutes the symbolic value of the line. Next to the symbolic aspect, the line for a painting necessitates a visual and aesthetical side. The main factor in the aesthetics of the line, regardless of its form, coincides with its degree of perfection. In the process of taking out unnecessary and superficial inequalities, a state of transcending beauty can be reached by which something is brought to artistical value. As Malevich said “Sandpaper finalizes that, what the file couldn’t make”. The painting is not negating, neither is it an exact transformation of reality, instead it is everything we see and emphatize. When Malevich based suprematism, he reduced art to its most simple elements, a simple form in two colors according to a certain composition in a confined space. With this he emphasized, more extremely than any of his predecessors, the painting as a painting. At the same time he transformed it into a symbol with various layers of meaning. He did not negate existing art; he just cleaned up and refined the abundance of artificial beauty and turned it into a modern icon, that symbolized a ‘supreme’ reality, by geometry and independent abstraction in itself. And where he stopped, is where I attempt to continue, namely by reducing the geometrical form to its basic element of the all-encompassing line. The line itself is visible and in autonomous interaction with the background of the anonymous, empty canvas. Visually, on this void, monochrome surface something is concretely existing. The line and its context bring together different energies, which are parallel to hearing a sound in a surrounding of silence. These constitute the two elementary components of the painting: the emptiness and the existence. This is additionally supported by the use of elementary colors. Furthermore asymmetrical symmetry and the general form of the painting are of great significance to how we experience the work. The generally long size of the painting prevents one from concentrating on the center. Instead, one is forced to follow the painting from one side to another, while the center of the painting exists by the grace of the observer’s movement. This provokes the initial view’s symmetrical division, which in reality is constituted by asymmetry existing of difference in size, distance and width of the line. The concreteness of the line and nonsymmetrical symmetry offers a continuous change of focus from negative to positive and vice versa. Thus the continual variation in interruptive intervals effectuate a sense of vibration, while straight and sharp corners and intuitive order suggest a false mathematical correctness, that renders the painting nothing more (nor less) than a meditating quality.
Moving Stills 1
Coming from One-liners, which focused on the singular line in motion as part of a larger, invisible totality, in the series Moving Stills 1, the invisible subject becomes visible and instead of an orientation on the passing movement, the works concentrate on the motion of the subject in its own existence and form, around its own axis, thereby provoking a three-dimensional sensation.
Moving Stills 2
Similar to the conceptualization that underlies One-liners, the return to the exploration of the part of/for the total (the pars-pro-toto), with its indefinite, invisible boundaries, resulted in this fragmental sequence that is constituted by Moving Stills 2. In contrast to One-liners, the focus in these works is on the plurality of the fragment, where various elements –all with their own exact size and distance to surrounding elements- visibly interact with each other. These elements, divided by mathematically parallel lines, are perceived as running diagonally and vibrantly manipulating the margins of one another, thereby optically suggesting ongoing overlapping and crisscrossing motions that bring the painting into movement.
Move to New York
In 2003 I moved to New York, where -now over ten years since I started Moving Stills- I continue to work on this Series and still keep furthering this Minimalist-Abstract exploration and developing new "chapters" in this Series, which I these days title with the date of their finalization as a sort of personal diary.
Moving Stills 3
In Moving Stills 3 the motion in space -in contrast to the visibly meticulous correctness of the 1 and 2 series- acquires a seemingly increasing fluidity. Nevertheless each particle in the works of this series exists in its own defined boundaries, exact size and precise direction, thereby creating an absorbent vibration that has simultaneously converging as well as diverging features. In their individual distinctiveness, as well as in their cohesive collectivity the particles interact with the background of the exposed, untreated canvas. The entirety of movement and course of all elements in ostensible chaos, yet concrete formative structure when looked upon from a distance, render the work a transcendent reflective quality. And though the paintings in this series imply an amplified volatility in comparison to previous series, they are deprived of any incidental, unintentional influences that might distract from their subtleness, efficiency and lucidity of their overall effect.
