Arco Madrid 2025

Presented Artists: Salome Chigilashvili and Nato Sirbiladze

Gallery Artbeat presents a duo show by Salome Chigilashvili and Nato Sirbiladze at Arco Madrid 2025.

Salome Chigilashvili’s wall installation deconstructs the traditional concept of a pool, transforming it into a fragmented, abstract composition that challenges not only its architectural form but also its political, social, and environmental connotations. Pools have long been associated with control—over bodies, space, and resources. The installation's design emphasizes both vertical and horizontal alignments, creating a rhythmic architectural pattern across the wall. The intentional gaps between the pipes and tiles, along with their scattered, modular arrangement, evoke a sense of disruption and incompleteness, suggesting the collapse of a once-cohesive structure. Within this deconstructed space, the artist introduces embroidery, stitching white threads onto yellow tiles and gray pipes to form abstract, relief-like linear images. Traditionally linked to feminine labor and storytelling, embroidery is recontextualized here within an industrial setting. Through this delicate yet deliberate intervention, Chigilashvili infuses the cold, rigid materials with a sense of care and intimacy, transforming them into tactile surfaces that blur the boundaries between construction and craft.

Nato Sirbiladze’s work emerges from a time of transition, when old systems were unraveling, giving way to new and uncertain possibilities. Her compositions explore themes of change and liminality, drawing from personal memories, Eastern traditions, and universal archetypes. Central to Sirbiladze’s series is the motif of fish, depicted not merely as creatures but as symbols of transformation and resilience. These fish—varied in species and identity—often appear in hybrid forms, merging with algae or taking on abstract shapes that capture moments of metamorphosis. In one instance, a fish even transforms into a dragon. Inspired by the legend of the koi swimming upstream to become a dragon, these figures embody perseverance, struggle, and spiritual growth, evoking the journey toward enlightenment.

This series is deeply influenced by the fluid movements of Kabuki theater, a traditional Japanese performance art known for its vibrant expression, stylized gestures, and dramatic intensity. Sirbiladze employs brushstrokes with deliberate fluidity, seamlessly merging Eastern calligraphy with Western abstraction. Color plays a crucial role in her visual language, not merely as an aesthetic tool but as a sensory experience that bridges the physical and conceptual. Soft washes of blues, pastels, and ethereal tones in the background evoke the boundless, formless depths of water, while vivid strokes of red, ochre, and deep green in the foreground create dynamic, calligraphic gestures—rising and vanishing with fleeting intensity.

Salome Chigilashvili (b. 1996, Tbilisi, Georgia) is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans installation, sculpture, painting, and found objects. She graduated from the Visual Arts, Architecture & Design School (VAds). Her work explores themes of deconstruction, memory, and transformation, incorporating urban and industrial materials such as concrete, steel, and thread. Architectural forms and fragmented human figures often merge in her creations, reflecting liminality and the interplay between the constructed and the organic.

Chigilashvili’s work has been featured in international exhibitions such as 2024 - Links, Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, USA, 2021 - Distant Symphony, Emma Scully Gallery, New York, USA, 2019 - Story As A Woven Carpet, Projects Gallery, Berlin, Germany, 2019 - And Stitching Stones, Somerset House, London, England. Her national exhibitions include 2022 - XX-XXI: Georgian Art from Private Collections, D. Shevardnadze National Gallery, Tbilisi, Georgia and 2022 - All Songs Die As Soon As They Are Forgotten, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, Georgia.

Nato Sirbiladze (b. in 1955, Tbilisi) after finishing school she continued to study in the Pedagogic Institute to become a teacher. In different periods she worked at the National Library, at the Institute of Management and as a school teacher. Sirbiladze never studied art and started painting at the age of 31. Her artworks are made on paper and several hundreds of them are painted in gouache and aquarelle. Sirbiladze is an artist who has never been part of any artistic schools or groups. She has also rarely been mentioned in the narratives of the local artistic context and has continued her creative path independently. Until recently her representation in public spaces has been limited to a few occasions locally and abroad.