“Body Experience... is the Center of Creation” - Barbara Hepworth

14 April - 25 May, 2019

Project ArtBeat, 14, Pavle Ingorokva  str., Tbilisi, Georgia

Participating artists: Lia Bagrationi, Tamar Chaduneli, Nino Chubinishvili (Aka Chubika), Jesse Darling, Salome Dumbadze, Thea Djordjadze, Holly Hendry, Gvantsa Jishkariani, Keti Kapanadze, Kataryna Przezwanska and Nino Sakandelidze.

Project ArtBeat and TBC Status are pleased to present the sculpture group exhibition, “Body Experience... is the Center of Creation” - Barbara Hepworth.

The exhibition is featuring works by international artists from different generations. It attempts to reflect on the diversity of their artistic practices, whilst at the same time highlighting their common gesture to use sculpture as a tool to lead the conversation about the specific potential of sculpture as a means to change the way we view our surroundings.

This exhibition avoids limiting its focus to any single contemporary art movement, but rather chooses to incorporate over ten individualistic artworks in a diverse range of used materials addressing sociopolitical, identity, gender, and class issues. The show is highlighting the artists' role in using three-dimensional works in order to interpret and comprehend world around us.

Artists:

Lia Bagrationi (b. 1957, Tbilisi, Georgia) lives and works in Tbilisi. She graduated from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in 1980. Bagrationi is a co-founder of the Georgian Ceramic Art and Craft Foundation, The Clay Office based in Tbilisi and a member of IAC (International Academy of Ceramics) based in Geneva. She is currently an associate professor on the Faculty of Design at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. In 2000 she received the Grand Prize in the First Symposium of Georgian Ceramists. As for artist Bagrationi is not confined to one subject area, preferring to vary her projects and media. Though clay, and specifically features of clay remain as her main medium.
 "Clay is a medium that encapsulates two worlds intersecting. Due to this unique quality, it holds multiple layers of cultural data from the beginning of times. In the spaces that you move through, you bypass this data - the imprints of millenniums flowing through plastic veins, depicted and encrypted via cultural codes in clay. In cyber era, when information travels at unimaginable speeds, we are faced with dangers of perceiving just the digital, while all that is visible and tangible remains unseen”.

Tamar Chaduneli (b. 1991, Rustavi, Georgia) lives and works in Frankfurt and Tbilisi. She graduated from Tbilisi State Academy of arts - Media art faculty in 2013 and the same year studied at non formal master program of mediation at Center of Contemporary Art - Tbilisi (CCA-T). In 2017 started school at Staatliche Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste - Staedelschule at Willem de Rooij class. In 2016 Tamar was invited in Dusseldorf, Germany and in 2017 in Kiev, Ukraine at an artist in residency programs. Together with group ‘block 21’ Tamar is co-founder of artist in residency program in Rustavi. Opening of the residency space was part of Tbilisi Triennial program.
On conceptual bases her work can be characterized by combination of different media such as sculpture, painting, drawing, video game, animation, procedural installations. Her works investigate language of visual culture and image production. Emulating forms and constructions of everyday object design and architecture from memory and imagination point towards impact specific to surfeit of images we see all around us.

Nino Chubinishvili (Aka Chubika) (b. 1969 Tbilisi, Georgia) Lives and works in Tbilisi. She has worked with such fashion houses as KENZO and Pierre Cardin. After graduating from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in the field of stage and costume design, Chubika has received different awards for costume design several times. In 2005-2006 the artist continued studying in Paris, at Institute Francais de la Mode. Chubika is as much part of the fashion world as she is part of the Georgian contemporary art scene. In 1990s she was a member of informal multimedia artistic group - Goslab.

Jesse Darling (b. 1981, Oxford, United Kingdom) Lives and works in Berlin. Darling completed MFA Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, 2014 and BA Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design, 2010. Jesse Darling is an artist working in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, text, sound and performance. Their work is broadly concerned with what it means to be a body in the world, though what that means is both politically charged and culturally determined. Their practice draws on their own experience as well as the narratives of history and counterhistory. To be a body is to be inherently vulnerable, which extends to the “mortal” quality of empires and ideas as a form of precarious optimism - nothing and no one is too big to fail, and this for JD is the starting point for a practice in which fallibility and fungibility are acknowledged as fundamental qualities in living beings, societies and technologies. Imagining ‘the high church of the modern ‘as a moveable or precarious tabernacle, JD’s works and writing feature an array of free-floating consumer goods, liturgical devices, construction materials, fictional characters and mythical symbols detached from the architectures, hierarchies and taxonomies in which they have their place. JD’s projects include 58th Venice Biennale, a solo show as part of Art Now, Tate Britain, London (2018), a participation in 'A Cris Ouverts’, Biennale d’art contemporain, Rennes (2018) and in ‘Metarmophõseõn’, Galerie Sultana, Paris (2018). JD has received commissions from MoMA Warsaw, The Serpentine Gallery and Volksbuhne Berlin among others. Their recent solo exhibitions include 'Support Level’, Chapter, New York (2018).

Salome Dumbadze (b. 1992, Tbilisi, Georgia) lives and works in Tbilisi. She graduated from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts (2010 - 2014). She Studied master’s course at CCA - Center of Contemporary Art Tbilisi. In addition to her independent practice she has collaborative works with Qeu Meparishvili. Her main mediums are painting and objects. She had solo and group exhibitions in Tbilisi: “Project 3016”, (2017); Patara Gallery - ‘Observation of the players in the sand’, (2018); Tbilisi Oxygen No Fair ‘Unchewable Constructs’; Tbilisi Art Fair - Group show; Project ArtBeat Gallery - part of group show “Tbilisi, Tbilisi”.

Thea Djordjadze (b. 1971, Tbilisi Georgia) Lives and works in Berlin. Thea Djordjadze’s expansive installations are always developed on site and in direct response to the surrounding space. She begins by exploring the specific qualities of an exhibition space; her works subtly transform the viewer’s perception and possible interpretations of the given architectural situation. Drawing on the visual language of architecture and functional design, Djordjadze creates sculptural environments that foreground the lasting legacy of Modernism while evoking the vernacular and folk traditions native to the Caucasus region in the Republic of Georgia. Djordjadze has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including MIT List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts (2014); the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2013); Malmo Konsthall, Malmo, Sweden (2012); and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri (2011). She has participated in the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and Documenta 13 (2012).

Holly Hendry (b. 1990, London, United Kingdom) Lives and works in London. Her sculptures define the architecture of spaces by exploring scale, surface, colour and density with a wide range of materials in her installations. Hendry is a recipient of the Art Foundation Award for Experimental Architecture (2019), Kenneth Armitage Young Sculptor Award (2016) and the Woon Foundation Prize for Painting and Sculpture (2014).
Holly graduated in 2016 with an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London having gained a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2013. Selected solo exhibitions include; GUM SOULS, Frutta Rome (2018), For A Skeleton to Hang Soft Tissues On, Arratia Beer, Berlin (2017), Wrot, BALTIC, Newcastle (2017) BACKWASH, The Door, Rice & Toye, London, (2016), More and More, More is More, Bosse & Baum, London, (2015), VISITS, Curate Projects, London (2015) and Hollow Bodies, Gallery North, Newcastle Upon Tyne, (2014). Hendry recently completed a new large-scale public commission for the Liverpool Biennial 2018 and Phyllis, a new public sculpture commissioned by Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Selfridges, for the new entrance of Selfridges, Duke Street. In 2019 Holly will present a solo show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Gvantsa Jishkariani (b. 1991, Rustavi, Georgia) Lives and works in Tbilisi. After studying at Tbilisi State Academy of Art (BA in Architecture) she gained an Informal MA in Inclusive Mediation at Center of Contemporary Art - Tbilisi. In 2017, she won Tsinandali Award in visual arts. Jishkariani is an artist whose primary medium is installation. Her work addresses first and foremost the topics of expectations, beliefs and taste. The temporary nature of the paradox that arises when searching for concrete definitions of right and wrong, east and west, old and new is one of her subjects of interest. Through her installations, videos and sculptures she takes traditional notions of cultural identity, ancient views, paradoxical beliefs and superstitions and plays with them.

Keti Kapanadze was born in Tbilisi in 1962 . While still a student at the Art Academy in Tbilisi, she produced her first conceptual graphical and photo works in 1983, she was the first conceptual artist in Georgia in Soviet times. Since that time her works are part of the permanent exhibition of the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the USSR at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, USA. From 1990 to 1999 she worked abroad, supported by scholarships from the Sheffield City Polytechnic, the CCA Contemporary Art Center, Glasgow, the BAK Swiss Federal Foundation, Berne, and the IAAB Christoph Merian Stiftung, Basel. She also won First Prize in Photography awarded by the “Open Society Georgia” in 1997 in Tbilisi. She was also one of the editors of the Georgian art magazine “Signal” which she helped launch in 1998.
In 2000 Keti left her country for Germany, supported by the Baumann Stiftung. In 2001, she was invited as Visiting Professor for the Painting Class a Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. In 2007 she was awarded a scholarship by Cité des Arts in Paris, Ministry of Science, Research and Culture, Paris, France. Her works are in important European collections, such as Staatsgalerie State Stuttgart, and the Museum Bochum. Today, Keti lives and works in Bonn, Germany.

Kataryna Przezwanska (b. 1984, Warsaw Poland) Lives and works in Warsaw. She studied Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In her artistic practice, she often refers to nature and architecture. She combines both of these fields in an effort to improve the quality of human life, constantly trying to make art useful. She is inspired by both vernacular architecture and the 20th-century classics as well as geological phenomena and vegetative processes. Przezwańska is the author of architectural interventions, installations, and paintings, where she often uses natural materials: rocks, minerals, and plants.

Nino Sakandelidze (b. 1985, Tbilisi, Georgia) lives and works in Tbilisi. In 2005 she Graduated in Monumental Painting from the Tbilisi Academy of Arts; At the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna among other prominent tutors she studied at Franz Graf and Daniel Richter class (2006-2015). She is a co-founder and curator of annual exhibition “OXYGEN - Tbilisi No Fair”, Tbilisi, Georgia. She is a Professor of a painting at the Free University - VADS (Visual Arts and Design School) Tbilisi, Georgia. Her most recent shows include: Artist’s Statement _ “Pending Messages / Platonic; Converstationalists” - PARALLEL VIENNA (2016). “Workout Fear” - OXYGEN - Tbilisi No Fair, Tbilisi Georgia (2018). “Block 76“, Tbilisi Architecture Biennial, curated by Lali Pertenava (2019). She has been exhibited at Parallel Vienna , Büro Weltaustellung , Vienna, Büro Weltuntergang” Büro Weltausstellung, Vienna, Kunstraum am Schauplatz, Documenta Athens, Wiener Art Foundation, Athens and more.

Photo Credit: Angus Leadley Brown