Aaahhh!!! Paris Internationale Art Fair

Presented artists: Nika Kutateladze and Salome Chigilashvili

For the 7th edition of Paris Internationale Gallery Artbeat presents Nika Kutateladze and Salome Chigilashvili.

This duo show explores and presents the key concepts related to the perception of history and everyday reality. Each of the artists share an experience from personal perspective through their creativity, aspire to provoke the audience into thinking about how our reality changes over time, but at the same time they reveal tight connection to past events. Recorded parts of daily life, facts and events in memory are taking their form and are transformed in different shapes, sizes, materials and patterns.

Expressive forms of Nika Kutateladze varies according to its contextual, environmental and spatial specificities. Artist mainly speaks about traits to different situations and concentrates influences of daily life on environment.  In Kutateladze’s site specific, immersive installations various architectural works are connected to contemporary and historic contexts.

In his painting series often may be seen architectural details, which could be integrated in picture itself or highlight connection to architectural spaces by its constructive frames of painterly art work. In his art work series either art installation or painterly medium speaks about the daily life of a dying mountainous village in Guria. Author somehow translates history of architectural landscape, daily rituals and environment into visual language.

Each of his depicted objects seems to be freezed in time, functionless and dramatic. In order to achieve this timelessness effect artist often refers to compositional schemes of Georgian medieval iconography. In general artist uses different methods and references to express far broader problems, which have been permanent for the last decades in Georgia.

Salome Chigilashvili’s art carries clear sign of conceptual minimalism and is made in wide range of mixed medias. It can be easily recognized in small and medium sized art objects tactile and coloristic effects. Artist achieves this result by experimenting of embroidered tissues with different types of mediums: plaster, stone or even ice.  At the end we perceive colorful massive patches, which catches observer’s eye momentarily.

Georgian embroidery and patterns are often seen in Salome Chigilashvili’s art works. She frequently makes references to traditional Georgian embroidery methods and tries to transform them as narratives. By making of simple colorful threads she tries to study tradition of Georgian embroidery technique and show it in new context. 

Artworks of Chigilashvili provoke feministic discourse and can be read as referent to historic story of embroider women. This social routine determined economic state of country many centuries ago.

Nika Kutateladze was born in 1989, in Tbilisi. He studied on the faculty of Architecture at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts between 2007 – 2011. In 2013 he graduated an informal master’s course at the Centre of Contemporary Art, Tbilisi (CCA-T). The majority of the artworks comprise installations and sculptures, reflecting day-to-day consumerism and different environmental issues. His later artistic utterances challenge the transformative process of architectural spaces and urban environment, in general.

Selected solo and group exhibitions:
2020-21 - ‘Tariel is Getting Ready for Hibernation’, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, Georgia; 2019 - ‘Metamorphosis’, Art in Europe Now - The Fondation Cartier, Paris, France; 2018 - ‘To Protect My House While I’mAway’, Tbilisi Architectural Biennial, Tbilisi, Georgia; ‘Watermill on Former Pavlov Street’, Kunsthalle Tbilisi, Georgia; 2017 - ‘Minibus and Playground in My Old Apartment’ at Mitskevich Street 20, Tbilisi, Georgia; ‘Double Standards’, Yarat Contemporary Art Centre, Baku, Azerbaijan; 2016 - ‘Wall, Coarse calico, Parquet’, Tbilisi, Georgia; 2015 - ‘AD HOC’, LA STATION, Niece, France; 2014 - FEST I NOVA 2014 - ‘OPUS MIXTUM’, Art villa Garikula, Georgia; 2013 - ‘Am I You’ - Gallery Container, Tbilisi, Georgia.

Salome Chigilashvili is an emerging Georgian visual artist, born in 1996 in Tbilisi, Georgia. She graduated from Visual Arts, Architecture & Design  School – VA[A]DS of Free University of Tbilisi.

She is a multimedia artist, mostly working with sculpture, painting and found objects. As a material she often uses threads and plaster.

Since 2016 she has taken part in several projects and exhibitions:
2020 - Nine Lipped Goddess ‘, curated by Natia Bukia, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, Georgia; ‘Clean Hands’, curated by Nino Sakandelidze, Tbilisi, Georgia; 2019 - ‘Story As A Woven Carpet’, curated by Irina Popiashvili - 68 Projects Gallery, Berlin, Germany; ‘Stitching Stones’, collaboration with Situationist - Somerset House, London, United Kingdom; ‘Tabula Rasa’ - Kunsthalle Tbilisi, Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia; ‘Crosscurrents’, curated by Marcus Fairs, Irina Popiashvili - Window Project Gallery, Tbilisi, Georgia; 2018 - ‘Oxygen_Tbilisi No Fair’ - Tbilisi, Georgia; Artisterium - Tbilisi 11th International Contemporary Art Exhibition, Tbilisi History Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia; ‘Who Does She Think She Is?’ - Not A Charity Auction at Rooms hotel, Tbilisi, Georgia; Abandoned German school of Tbilisi; ‘Interaction’ - Artarea Gallery, Tbilisi, Georgia; ‘Interaction’ - Artarea Gallery, Tbilisi, Georgia; Georgian Contemporary Art Auction - Not A Charity Auction, Tbilisi, Georgia; 2017 - ‘All And Everything’ - Artarea Gallery, Tbilisi, Georgia; ‘Nearby Not Far Away’ - VA[A]DS, Free University, Tbilisi, Georgia; Skola x VAADS - Exposition And a New Publication; 2016 - ‘Time And Time +’ at an abandoned building of Tbilisi (Tabukashvili st.), Tbilisi, Georgia; ‘Who Does She Think She Is?’ - Not A Charity Auction at Rooms hotel, Tbilisi, Georgia.