WHERE TO BEGIN? Perhaps with the graffiti I see at the Fabrika factory turned “multifunctional urban space” on the left bank of the Kura River in Tbilisi. Gritty, gorgeous, wildly colorful, it is indicative of the ubiquity and dynamism of art in the Georgian capital. Or with the Niko Pirosmani exhibition at the Dimitri Shevardnadze National Gallery: more than a dozen paintings on his customary oilcloth—this juggernaut of Georgian art orphaned and self-taught and unsung and then beloved. To see them on the first day, as I did, is to come to apprehend the context for the dense and shimmering fabric that is the Tbilisi Art Fair, now in its fourth iteration.
It is Thursday, April 11, and among the thirty or so galleries on the ExpoGeorgia campus is Gallery Artbeat. They began as Project ArtBeat, a shipping container that brought art to various regions far from the artistic center and capital, Tbilisi. Cofounders Natia Bukia and Salome Vakhania opened a permanent space three years later, in 2017, in Old Tbilisi, and immediately began representing exclusively Georgian artists, bringing their work to international art fairs from Untitled Miami to Art Dubai. “People didn’t even know where we were coming from”—quite literally, Vakhania told me, hailing as they did from this country at the crossroads of East and West. Now “they’re interested in both the younger generation and older artists,” the gallerist said.
Among the former is Nika Kutateladze, who paints on the wooden panels used for icons and nestles them into installations that feel postapocalyptic. Across from him in the Gallery Artbeat booth, where one of his haunting paintings hangs, is a work by Mamuka Japharidze, one of the earliest Georgian Conceptual artists and a stalwart of a generation active in the ’80s and ’90s, through the end of Soviet occupation and a tumultuous civil war. “Some amazing artists were working during the Soviet Union [and] after,” Vakhania says. “Galleries didn’t exist; they didn’t have any opportunities. So for us to work with them is historic.”
“They were never stopping their practices, so that’s also super inspiring,” Bukia adds of this generation, seeing in them examples of continuity and courage. “Nineties Georgia: We have no electricity, we are literally sleeping with our clothes on, no hot water, nothing, and then you would have these performances,” she says, showing me black-and-white photographic documentation of the crowd from that era.
Elsewhere, among the booths, this mix of old and new continues: here the diaphanous abstract watercolors of Georgian artist Vera Pagava, which were part of a series shown at the pavilion of France (her adopted home) at the Venice Biennale in 1966. Veteran gallery Vernissage has hung a collection of vintage monochromatic works from the 1930s and 1960s, which film set designer, painter, and graphic artist Serapion Vatsadze made in ink on the backs of film scripts; in the sketchy figures, I feel as though I can read the history of every gesture ever made in early cinema. Elene Abashidze’s EA Shared Space is showing Mariana Chkonia’s dry and wet felted tapestries; dark from natural dyes and lushly made and thick, they hark back to a historical tradition, but their elegant heft dissolves distinctions. And at LC Queisser, the patterned, detailed work of Vati Davitashvili (his masterfully naive still lifes of Georgian flatbreads and quiet windowscapes) hangs side by side with the exquisitely dreamy, loose expressiveness of Elene Chantladze (she of the floating goats and cherubic figures), both artists on fringes of one sort or another: she a self-taught almost-octogenarian in the remote countryside; he deemed an “outsider” artist, as so many were.
On Friday, I enter the home of the late multihyphenate luminary painter, critic, poet, and editor Karlo Kacharava, who died at the age of thirty in 1994, and whose sister, Lika Kacharava, devotedly plays the role of guardian in this time capsule apartment. As his severe, angular figures and bleak cityscapes glower from the walls, she shows us sketchbooks, diaries, and other memorabilia that are not in his concurrent solo exhibition at SMAK contemporary art museum in Ghent, Belgium. Presiding over the intimate tour is also Irena Popiashvili, dean and founder (in 2013) of the Visual Art, Architecture & Design School at the Free University of Tbilisi, who has twice curated the Georgia pavilion at the Venice Biennale and is a force within the contemporary art scene. Her students’ work occupied one hall of the Tbilisi Art Fair, with pieces from young Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Belarusian artists, among others. “We start this dialogue and get to know the artists in the countries that are next to us,” Popiashvili explained as we stood amid the student work. “Because the information before was mediated via Moscow, and post-Soviet era, we are learning about Ukrainian or Kazakh art through Artforum or Frieze when we can actually physically go there. And this is what I’m trying to restore or restart.” With tremendously optimistic overtones, she calls these young artists Generation Zero, restarting even as they carry the torch of past generations, while wrestling to source the materials they need to make their art. “This is a generation that is going to create theory and not always quote Baudrillard,” she says. “They should know it, but they should create their own theory. I think that’s where we’re at.”
You could say Generation Zero is Kristine Godaladze, the student who has recycled a block of cement from her Soviet-era childhood playground, laid it on its side, and inserted a video projection into its core, which I lean in to watch, tilting into a kind of temporal vertigo. “This is how she works with her past and with her own context,” Popiashvili says, standing next to me. You could say Generation Zero is the young curator and artist Gvantsa Jishkariani, founder of artist-centric Patara Gallery and the Why Not Gallery, whose recollections of the Soviet-era mosaics she saw glittering as a child inform her own mosaic flowers of marble, lapis lazuli, and pink opal, exhibited at the fair, though she subverts their original purpose with a whimsy all her own. You could say the thoughtful energy of Generation Zero is everywhere.
One evening, after a gallery crawl in the right-bank district of Old Tbilisi, I attend a dinner at fine bastion Alubali, and it’s a wash of shared plates and elaborate toasts and splendor. It is also this way at Sasadilo Atzeche, a restaurant in a converted factory canteen, with its Soviet-era mural, its cheesy cornmeal sticks (a version of elarji) and pickles, all earthbound tartness, and warm bread. It is this way at Khash-Khash, with its soulful, hearty dumplings (khinkali) and vegetable dishes. The food is as much a mosaic as the city and its art.
In between meals and studio visits, talks and gallery shows—the gusts of the art whirlwind—I wander into churches where bunches of daffodils stand under gilded icons, gaze at remarkable derelict brick and stone facades with neoclassical motifs, and marvel at the imbrication of balconies with wooden screens and worn, dainty columns. I enter ramshackle courtyards full of cats and white-blossomed trees.
In the midst of a VIP afterparty, an international crowd mills. A French gallerist based in Marseilles tells me he would like to show at the fair next year—it is why he is here. We are at Honoré, a sprawling bar and restaurant with a stunning, leafy back courtyard, and part of the entertainment is traditional male polyphonic singing, haunting and ethereal. It is the same kind of soaring song I will experience later, on Saturday night, at the presidential palace. Amid sparkling wine and petits fours, the entire art-fair crowd celebrates president Salome Zourabichvili awarding a medal of honor to the duo of Tbilisi Art Fair founder Kaha Gvelesiani and art director Eric Schlosser.
On the last morning, I stop by the locale known as the Six Room Flat on the left bank, an apartment rented for the past three years by six young artists who have studied in Tbilisi and abroad. Ana Gzirishvili speaks about the architectural structure the team has devised for its fair-adjacent open-house exhibit, traversing the existing walls, breaking down the space, a room-within-a-room that is a foreign body but also a uniting support. In this conceit, articulated with extraordinary finesse, is the notion of a togetherness potent with possibility, a limit that is also a threshold. For instance, one of Gzirishvili’s own found-object sculptures of used handbags and resin casts—simultaneously vulnerable and parasitic—dangles from one of the crossbeams.
Meanwhile, light fills the delicately crumbling, ruined apartment, spilling over a parquet floor and causing surfaces to glow. In Gzirishvili’s compatriots’ work, which fits the city’s protean, changeable landscape, I find otherness evoked in the dreamlike juxtapositions of site-specific video art installed in the shadowy bathroom. In a ceramic piece that unites the muzzle of a wolf-dog with the undulating shape of corrugated tin, I see the stray dogs I’ve observed lounging everywhere in the streets—and I see the streets themselves in their material renewal and decay. And I cannot help but admire the framework these young artists are building by themselves, scrappy and scintillating and now in the global spotlight, amid the peeling wallpaper in a city filled with hope and ghosts.
bank of the Kura River in Tbilisi.
