New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) 2021
Presented artists: David Meskhi and Tamo Jugeli
At 19th edition of NADA Miami Gallery Artbeat is pleased to represent Georgian contemporary artists Tamo Jugeli and David Meskhi. The dialogue between these two artists will demonstrate different cultural contexts and crossing points of art discourses.
A body is the central object of all politics. There are no politics that are not body politics. The very task of political action is to fabricate a body, to put it to work, to define its modes of production and reproduction, to foreshadow the modes of discourse by which that body is fictionalized to itself until it is able to say ‘I’ - Michel Foucault.
In the modern world transnational capitalism and globalization posed question mark under concept of the body. How is body understood and in what context? What kind of value and significance does it carry? Maybe we can interpret it as a physical reality that is formed directly by social and historical forces or maybe think of it as a merely social constructs, unlike of biological phenomenon. Maybe it is necessary to emancipate body, mind and memory in order to unleash ourselves from power control?
In this group exhibition object of representation becomes the body as code, which is extended in various mediums of the art pieces.
As for me body represents brush in order to say what I have intended and need. You can narrate and read anything by body representations. – David Meskhi
In David Meskhi’s art central place takes body and its understanding as an entity. His object frequently denies gravitational force and their physical state are depicted in transitional point – in peak of weightless moment. This state captured in air appears as break off from reality and somehow attempts to emancipate from surrounding environment. This breaking point refers to Soviet historic memory, when everything was determined by party ideology and equality in a military manner. However, inspiration source for artist appeared figures of flying athletes’ images depicted on Soviet journals, who had supernatural powers and looked alike to heroes from another planet – a planet, which was beyond the USSR. For David Meskhi this supernatural hero has become iconic images, who represented inner freedom and emancipation. Tamo Jugeli’s paintings also play important role by reshaping concept of body and transforming it into new forms. Her object of interest on canvas carry characteristics of impersonality. They signify process when body loses their quality and identity. Flowing figures are being liberated from general norms and mainstream constructs. In some cases, painterly images look alike x-ray images, where are revealed hidden layers. Bodies happen to appear in constant becoming, they cannot resist immobility so that their rectangular shapes hardly are able to constraint them.
David Meskhi (1979, Tbilisi) completed his photography degree at Shota Rustaveli Theatre and Film University in Tbilisi in 2005. Early in his career he worked as a photographer for the main Georgian cultural magazines and his artworks were presented in the collection of the Georgian House of photography. After his first Solo show he co-directed an award winning documentary-”When the Earth Seems to be Light”, which is based on his photographs. His works have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including a solo presentation in Paris Photo in 2019, the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt, the Braunsfelder Family Collection in Cologne, the Calvert 22 Foundation in London, the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi, and the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in Budapest, Kunstverein Freiburg and the Biennale de la Photographie de Mulhouse. David Meskhi lives and works between Tbilisi and Berlin.
Tamo Jugeli is a young, Georgian emerging self-taught artist born in 1994. During 2013-2017 she studied Journalism at David Aghmashenebeli University of Georgia and only started painting af- ter. Soon she became mentored by internationally renowned artist and writer, Gia Edzgveradze.
Paintings of Tamo Jugeli carry traces of unconscious impulses by its linear as well as color factures. An intuitive flow composed of simple elements of figures, colors and forms create complex and dynamic networks, which sometimes are transformed into shapes and sometimes are broken into abstractive signs. Each element stands on the frontier of a figurative or a plane deconstruction. Visual signs establish sculptural, fluid, spatial dimensions and attain their autonomy. We are witnesses to a game between transgration and sublimation, between the rational and the irrational.
Artworks, which have their own scale, space and limitless desire to break the boundaries can easily be read as topographic maps of brisk and irrational motion.
Selected solo and group exhibitions:
2021 - NADA Miami Art Fair, Miami, USA; Art Cologne Art Fair, Cologne, Germany; ‘Digital Natives’, TBC Concept, Tbilisi, Georgia; ’Limen’, Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography, Mestia, Georgia; 2020 - Art Cologne Art Fair, Cologne Germany; ‘Unnamed 2020’, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, Georgia; 2019 - NADA Miami Art Fair, Miami, USA; The Institut für Alles Mögliche, artist residency, Berlin, Germany; Handler - John Riepenhoff, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, Georgia; Tbilisi Art Fair 2019, Tbilisi, Georgia; ‘You Know What?! I don't Have a Good Feeling about Cakes Around Here’, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, Georgia; 2018 - Art-Villa Garikula, artist residency, Garikula, Georgia; Archetypes, Art Up - Street Gallery, Batumi, Georgia.