Nika Kutateladze - Gia Has Planted Seedlings Which Will Bloom

3 May - 22 June, 2025

Gallery Artbeat presents Nika Kutateladze’s solo exhibition ‘Gia Has Planted Seedlings Which Will Bloom’.

Through the mediums of painting and installation, Kutateladze’s work studies the nuances of relations between people who live as neighbours in rural environments. Having himself spent time living in remote mountain regions in Georgia, Kutateladze takes these small communities as a starting point to meditate on how people both rely on one another and struggle to live together. All Kutateladze’s recent works derive from his observations of the few inhabitants of a single, depopulated mountain village.

His paintings – made with oil on grounded wood (following the tradition of Orthodox iconographic paintings in the region) and more recently with oil on canvas — convey an atmosphere of wordlessness. Feral jackals live silently with human figures; darkness and cold seeming to seep through all sense of communication between these solitary characters, who themselves appear to have disintegrated into the wilderness. In some paintings, human figures almost disappear into nature entirely. In these scenes Kutateladze portrays people seeming to merge with their wild surroundings but growing more distant from one another.

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.