Art Basel 2025

Presented artist: Nika Kutateladze

Gallery Artbeat presents Georgian artist Nika Kutateladze’s solo presentation at Art Basel 2025. Through a compelling interplay of painting and spatial transformation, Kutateladze turns the booth into a fragmented domestic interior—an evocative, site-specific installation that echoes a typical living room in a depopulated mountain village in western Georgia.

The experience begins with a narrow corridor, guiding visitors into an enclosed, home-like environment. Yet, this space is more layered than it first appears. Its walls carry more than they enclose, offering access to unseen dimensions shaped by memory, dream, and displacement.

At the installation’s center lies a raised wooden platform painted in dark reddish-brown. Its surface is partially broken, with missing or misaligned slats—suggesting neglect, collapse, or abandonment. The structure closely resembles the traditional wooden floors typically found in village homes, invoking a sense of rural domesticity now left to decay. Along one edge, sharp metal spikes protrude, injecting a sense of threat or disruption into the familiar domestic setting. Nearby stands a sculptural object in the form of a door, marked by a wave-like cutout. Framed in gold-beige and filled with a soft, translucent material, the door neither opens nor leads anywhere. Instead, it becomes a symbolic portal—pointing toward a concealed realm where the boundaries between dream and reality begin to dissolve. This threshold leads not into another room, but into another state of consciousness.

Central to the narrative is an invisible, ghostly figure—the room’s former inhabitant—who, caught in a dream-like state, senses his surroundings slipping away. He cannot discern whether his room is being claimed by another presence or slowly reclaimed by nature. As viewers navigate the space, they encounter a large-scale canvas embedded in the installation. Its smoky blacks, deep blues, muddy browns, and ash greys coalesce into a dark, shifting landscape from which two jackals emerge. Hovering above them, a ghostly portrait floats like an icon, intensifying the feeling that the space is being overtaken by nonhuman forces.

Nearby, the painting Metsieti (2021) rests quietly between salvaged wooden planks, acting as both a visual focal point and a conceptual anchor within the space. Rendered in smoky blacks and greys, the canvas reveals the ghostly image of a waterfall, overlaid with bold green text. Its surface—etched with layers of scraping and rough textures—suggests a slow, quiet erosion, echoing the passage of time. Drawing its name from Metsieti, a village in Guria, western Georgia undergoing a process of disappearance, the work reflects a poignant attachment to place and memory. The name and date serve as quiet memorials, reinforcing the installation’s central theme: the gradual vanishing of rural areas.

Quietly dispersed throughout the room, smaller-format portraits further expand the installation’s emotional and psychological impact. Painted in oil on grounded wood—a technique rooted in medieval iconography—these works feature rough, matte surfaces that echo the raw textures of the deteriorating domestic space. In one particularly haunting image, overlapping faces dissolve into one another, their identities blurred across a shadowed landscape. Among them, the face of a child emerges—vulnerable yet spectral—heightening the emotional charge of the composition. A pale, winding path or river cuts through the background, symbolizing transition, memory, collective trauma, and loss.

Nika Kutateladze’s installation reflects the psychological traces of displacement, migration, and rural abandonment—issues deeply intertwined with Georgia’s current reality. Fragmented domestic elements, symbolic materials, and ghostly imagery converge to create a dream-like environment, where memory and absence shape a space suspended between reality and reverie.

Nika Kutateladze was born in 1989 in Tbilisi, Georgia, where he lives and works. He completed his education at Masters level at the Centre of Contemporary Art, Tbilisi (CCA-T) in 2013. Prior to that he studied on the faculty of Architecture at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts between 2007 and 2011. Kutateladze has had solo exhibitions at Mendes Wood DM, New York; Modern Art, London; Vitrine, London and Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi. His works have been included in exhibitions at Chateau La Coste, Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, France (2025); MAISON DES ARTS GEORGES & CLAUDE POMPIDOU, Cajarc, France (2024); CCA, Berlin, Germany (2024); Oxygen Biennial, Tbilisi, Georgia (2021); Foundation Cartier, Paris (2019); Tbilisi Architectural Biennial, Tbilisi, Georgia (2018); Kunsthalle Tbilisi, Georgia (2018); Centre of Contemporary Art Tbilisi, Georgia (2013) among others.