New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) 2024

Presented artists: Salome Chigilashvili, Tamo Jugeli, Nina Kintsurashvili

Gallery Artbeat brings together the works of three young Georgian artists, Salome Chigilashvili, Nina Kintsurashvili and Tamo Jugeli at NADA Miami 2024. Through their distinctive yet complementary practices, three artists delve into themes of deconstruction, memory, and identity, offering profound reflections on the socio-political and cultural landscapes.

Salome Chigilashvili’s works explore the layered interplay between the female body and architectural spaces, using hybrid materials to create forms that evoke and reframe concepts of femininity within built environments. Her choice of materials—brick, clay, and embroidery—represents a fusion of ancient and modern techniques, drawing on architectural materials that serve as structural foundations while incorporating methods like embroidery that carry deep associations with identity, memory, and gender. In her practice, Chigilashvili infuses these materials with symbolic weight, inviting a complex dialogue between the body’s organic qualities and the rigid structures of architecture. For instance, the use of clay layered over brick evokes a semblance of skin stretched across a wall, transforming the architectural material into a metaphor for the body’s outer layer.

Nina Kintsurashvili’s analytical but, at the same time, intuitive approach towards abstract painting probes the complexities of the medium itself. Her inquiry into the form manifests in diverse imagery and a range of painterly techniques. She works on her canvas separately, each having a particular internal logic and choreography. For Kintsurashvili the diverse approach and inquiry into specific formal questions make an artist a collector of various tools. For her, color, line, materiality of paint, the speed of a brushstroke, humor, the deceptive nature of human memory, and even the concept of time become tools applied to her process of image-making. Deconstructions, reflection, and mirroring concern Nina Kintsurashvili’s abstract paintings. The artist’s will to grasp a form on the verge of its total disfigurement - while it still holds some representational quality but its origin can no longer be traced - results in fluid and multilayered forms. These shapes exhibit pronounced corporeal features, creating a sense of depth and semi-perspective within them. The result is achieved not merely through layering but also by the deliberate act of erasure and regeneration. The process of deconstructing matter underscores the limitations of linear perception and offers alternative perspectives distinct from established ideologies. Her subjects of investigation, such as; an archaeological artifact, an erased medieval mural, or an art historical reference, transform into novel, synthetic forms. Through the artistic process, these objects experience visual and semantic metamorphosis, shedding their inherent meanings and connections. Thus emancipating themselves from the confines of ideological frameworks.

Nina’s works have been exhibited in Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography (Mestia, Georgia), Gallery Artbeat (Tbilisi, Georgia), Kunstraum Lakeside (Austria), LC Queisser (Tbilisi, Georgia), E.A. Shared Space (Tbilisi, Georgia), PS1 Iowa City.

In contrast, Tamo Jugeli’s paintings capture raw, unconscious impulses through linear and color fractures. Her intuitive compositions, composed of simple figures, colors, and forms, create complex, dynamic networks that oscillate between figurative shapes and abstract signs. Each element in Jugeli’s work stands on the frontier of deconstruction, establishing sculptural, fluid, and spatial dimensions that achieve autonomy. Jugeli’s paintings interrogate the fragmentation of identity, presenting hybrid, multispectral totalities that evoke the heterogeneous nature of contemporary human habitats. The complex interstitial zones within her works, saturated with data, challenges, and the imperative to transcend societal norms, become fertile ground for artistic exploration. Her art thrives in these liminal spaces, inviting critical engagement with the aftermath of disrupting the gravitational pull of societal structures and embracing vertiginous liberation.