Art from Georgia & Armenia Online

This March, our Art from Georgia & Armenia Online auction shines the spotlight on the vibrant contemporary art scenes in both Georgia and Armenia. The auction features a variety of artworks that showcase the richness of Georgia and Armenia's art and cultures that have been largely overlooked on the international art scene. In order to understand more about Georgian art, we spoke to Head of Sale, Daria Khristova, about five of her favourite works by key contemporary Georgian artists.

Lot 17
Vakho Bugadze
Flowers

A sculptor by profession, Vakho Bugadze decided to choose drawing as his main medium in the 1990s. His art, brutal and sensitive at the same time, has brought a distinctive style to contemporary Georgian art. By exploring the language of the human body through various mediums, he focused on sharing the range of emotions, conflicts, discoveries, and feelings that arise from physical contact. However, a few years ago, his interest in flowers prevailed, and he began to create numerous paintings devoted to exploring nature. Prior to this, Vakho’s art had never featured plants, making this a new phase in his artistic oeuvre. By incorporating images of flowers into large-scale canvases and fabrics he created an ideal organic artistic world.

Lot 19
Merab Abramishvili
The Last Supper

Merab Abramishvili's work transcends specific cultural boundaries and unites radically different cultures, including Western and Eastern, Christian and Islamic. His art was influenced by Persian miniatures and Georgian medieval frescoes. Despite this diverse range of influences, Abramishvili maintains a unique and individual style, utilising the cultural archive for his own interpretations and creating a series of icons and images. 

His works are technically impressive; the artist developed a distinctive method that involved using hand-prepared plaster and tempera paints. He would then seal the paintings with egg yolk to produce a translucent colour palette and create a delicate appearance to the work. Abramishvili prioritised decoration and patterns over realism and perspective. His thematic interests were also rooted in ancient concepts such as beauty, peace, music, and eternity. 

Lot 28
Tutu Kiladze
Lion Carpet

The naïve modernist paradigm of a play, the primitivist scheme of the avant-garde, the freedom of children's drawings—all these features shape the compositional and emotional baselines of Tutu Kiladze's work.

Kiladze creates safe territories for her characters, which are inspired by childhood and naïve images. The artist presents the streets, fields, forests and squares from a distance to produce large expanses or small scenes full of figures scattered like beads from a broken necklace. Interestingly, Kiladze manages to replicate the movements and facial expressions of these miniature creatures with amazing virtuosity—quite a feat given the distant location of the images. She depicts specific gestures or features which transport the audience into childhood. 

Lot 25
Guranda Klibadze
Flowers

Guranda Klibadze’s art is expressive and powerful. A painted flower opens and flourishes in front of our eyes; the trembling body of a horse exudes the excitement of a race; the intertwined figures of "Adam and Eve" and "Medea and Jason" demonstrate the fateful interlacing of the couples fates, astonished by Medea's escape, Aeetes' body burns like a torch. 

She selects large-scale pieces of paper and bold brush strokes, enamel textures of paint and complex monotype techniques. Her enchanting magical gardens remind us of the location of oracles, the places of mysteries; the figures are mythological characters, the actions are rituals. These are the eternal themes and motifs that fill her works with eternal energies, and flow wherever the artist shares her existential secrets.

Lot 11
David Sulakauri
View from Signagi in the winter

In David Sulakauri's work, visual images of European and Oriental art as well as Georgian monumental painting traditions combine in an organic creation. Granted the form of an expressive artistic world, his pictures respond to the socially pressing issues of the country and of modernity in general.

Experimenting with varied materials and techniques, his paintings and graphic works are afforded a plastic and pointedly textural expression. Sulakauri's landscapes, portraits, multi-figural and religious compositions impress the viewer with their monumentality, structural compositions and expressive artistic imagery.

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