Paris Internationale Art Fair 2023

Presented artist Tamo Jugeli

For the 8th edition of Paris Internationale Artbeat presents Tamo Jugeli’s solo show.

Tamo Jugeli abstracts without directives, allowing intuition to guide the brush, producing gestural surfaces that are singular to her. She carves out her own space, pushing forward in alliance with her paints. Her compositions are lyrical; the figures that emerge are fortuitous and never preconceived. Forgoing themes, Jugeli commits herself to a practice driven by instinct. She turns off her analytical impulse, scavenging for what she needs as she lets go in the studio. Jugeli aligns herself with wrist and body painters, oscillating between large and small scale gestures, figuration and abstraction.

“What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” notes the lauded German physicist Werner Heisenberg. Jugeli grapples with this as she deciphers her own painterly impulses; wielding a brush attuned to her own frequencies, like a divining rod in search of some elemental source. Compositions are marked by equivocality; a dog emerges or maybe it’s a bird or a cloud or not a shape but a series of lines that become a form by incident and then encounter.

Jugeli falls in line with John Graham’s musings on abstraction and the artist’s role. She pushes her paintings forward, “into the future or what is the ultimate logical destination of the given object in terms of form.” Abstraction is painting in its “highest” and “most difficult” form as “it requires of the artist the ability to take full stock of reality and the ability to make a departure from it,” postulates Graham. Jugeli studies her surroundings, meditates upon happenstance until she has observed and mastered a space, then moves on to the next.

Text by: Reilly Davidson

Tamo Jugeli is a Georgian 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:
2023 – ‘The Painting Show’, Artbeat, Tbilisi, Georgia; ‘Lightly’, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, USA; ‘Preview Milan #7’, BeAdvisors Art Department, Milan, Italy; ‘Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained’, Hill Art Foundation, New York, USA; 2022 - NADA Miami Art Fair, Miami, USA; Art Athina Art Fair, Athens, Greece; ‘Solitaire’, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, USA; ‘Random Order’, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, Georgia; 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; 2019 - Handler - John Riepenhoff, Gallery ArtBeat, Tbilisi, Georgia; 2019 - Tbilisi Art Fair 2019, Tbilisi, Georgia; 2019 - ‘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.