Art Dubai 2017

Presented artists: Konstantin Mindadze and Levan Mindiashvili

Project ArtBeat dedicates its booth to expanding field of painting and presents works of two Georgian artists Konstantin Mindadze (b. 1977) and Levan Mindiashvili (b. 1979). Both artists choose a medium of painting and its traditional techniques such as oil and acrylic paint on linen, to create works that can be placed in-between a painting and a sculptural relief or object.


Konstantin Mindadze, who’s practice started with the destruction of works made during his studies, is more interested in minimalist tradition of pictorial surface and shape. Choosing clear geometric shapes, such as circles or rhombus for his paintings, Mindadze creates dynamic tensions within his works either with the heavy impasto marks of one tone placed in a circular direction and creating surfaces alike to sculptural relief, or by dividing the whole image into smaller shapes, alluding structuralist ideas of an open ending work, creating a whole specter of possibilities to re-assemble and re-shape them.


Levan Mindiashvili’s practice expands to painting, sculpture and performative installations and is more linked to the post-internet condition, fluidly switching between identities and mediums, ignoring already blurred frontiers among the disciplines. His concerns with the idea of the image in times, when any person with the smartphone becomes an image maker and any social media offers a 24/7 flow of them, are best represented in his series of paintings entitled “Unintended Archeology”. Rigorously rendered in several layers of acrylic paint and gel medium they mimic vintage, pixelated photography. These works are questioning our perception and contain ironic take on nostalgic approach of past, while source material for them are recent photographs made by the artist himself during his trips to native Tbilisi. Mindiashvili's paintings, mostly diptychs, contain an actual image and its abstract version, inscribed with the name of the digital file used for the painting (for example: _IMG_5444.JPG) or hints to the ideas behind the work, such as “PAST is Just a Story We Tell Ourselves”. By exposing physical components of the painting - canvas and the stretchers, Mindiashvili attempts to ascribe physicality and ‘body’ to a vanishing image.

Works of these two artists create an interesting dialogue, outlining formal and conceptual aspects of contemporary painting and its endless expanding possibilities.