Frieze London 2025

Presented artist Ana Gzirishvili

Gallery Artbeat is pleased to present Ana Gzirishvili's solo presentation for Frieze London 2025.

Ana Gzirishvili’s installation explores liminal spaces between beings, objects, and places, addressing themes of transitionality, circulation, and displacement. Influenced by her upbringing amid the ruins of the Soviet Union, Gzirishvili examines instability and transformation through wooden boards resembling dismantled constructions and wet-molded leather sculptures casting still life compositions of found objects, produce, and plasticine forms resembling body parts set within architectural contexts. Referencing Timothy Morton’s idea that ‘to coexist is to have been wounded,’ her work interrogates the scars and impressions left by encounters between objects and environments.

Rather than depicting identity directly, these objects operate as memory traces—shaped equally by absence and presence. Their forms bear the imprint of encounters, gestures, and contexts that have been displaced and reassembled, suggesting a continuity between what is visible and what has disappeared. The sculptures present a fragmented form of self-portraiture, where presence emerges through absence—taking shape in the voids, textures, and material contours. Identity is not rendered as a fixed image but as a material echo—a presence articulated through form, texture, and spatial composition. These objects function as psychological mirrors, reflecting interior states in which identity is continually fractured and reconfigured.

The installation features five sculptures and a video. Three large wooden boards, resembling dismantled sites, lean or lie on the floor. Wet-molded leather sculptures depict still life with found objects, produce, and body-like forms. Two leather pieces’ rest on the floor, one is wall-mounted, and two attach to the boards. The third board supports a video installation depicting a quiet, dislocated landscape—a still life of found objects and plasteline forms. Once rooted in familiar contexts, these elements are now deterritorialized and reassembled into an atmospheric space that resists representation. What unfolds is an emptied field, shaped as much by light as by form. Animated shadows subtly distort scale and perception, holding the tension of presence and absence. The landscape becomes a crystal-image in Deleuze’s sense—a convergence of memory and material, touch and withdrawal, the actual and the virtual.