Until early May, two galleries in Tbilisi are showing Merab Abramishvili’s work. The first is in Vake, the most up-and-coming district in the city, a conglomerate of wide, shiny avenues, glass and steel buildings and elegant parks, shadowing older buildings and small patisseries and flower shops. The second, it suffices to say, is located just behind the Parliament of Georgia. Given the magnitude and significance of Abramishvili’s paintings, the locations’ choice couldn’t be more fitting.
Born in 1957 Georgia, Abramishvili – who died incredibly young in 2006, at the age of 49 – grew up in the middle of the Soviet Union, and got to witness both its highest, as a child, and especially its lowest point. Which undoubtedly both shaped and inspired his art. He is, in fact, part of what critics define as the “eighties generation” in Georgia. “The tragic violence that marks the modern world, and which took on a horrendous form in 1980s Georgia – explains curator Baia Tsikoridze – fostered among the artists of his generation a need to escape from reality and a desire to create their own, personal utopias”. In turn, artists from this period “elevated Georgian art to a new level within postmodernist culture”. Yet Abrmishvili’s works are incredibly hard to pin down to a comprehensive definition or fit in a specific movement – and are surely much more than that.
PARADISE AND HELL IN ABRAMISHVILI’S PAINTINGS
The works themselves are painted with poster paint, either on canvas or plywood – sometimes with a layer of chalk as background. In this latter case, the effect recalls (Georgian) church frescoes. The dimensions vary from square pieces of about 20x20cm to meters-long ones. What they all have in common is an almost obsessive precision of the trait and attention to detail, and an overlapping technique of different colours and images that makes them near to hypnotic. Each subject, pattern, layer, decoration is almost always repeated across a number of different paintings, nearly but never completely identical. The subjects are surely defined by the painter’s personal history: many recall Georgian religious imagery and mythology. Saints, symbols, and themes. Among them, many versions of paradise and hell. Swirly panthers half covered in dreamy vegetation, elegant peacocks, mighty tigers and immense gardens, as well as religious sites he likes of Jerusalem and Bethlehem and famous Georgian battles like the 300 Aragveli, or სამასი არაგველი – when 300 warriors were left alone to face the Persian invaders on their way to conquer Tbilisi. All these subjects, themes and episodes come together in Abramishvii’s work, forming an imaginative poetic of its own kind.
THE RECONSTRUCTION AND INDEPENDENCE OF GEORGIA
Most of his works were painted in the late 1980s and 1990s, when his production intensified. This was a crucial time for Georgia, that finally gained its independence in 1991. In fact, even though it might not be immediately apparent, Abramishvili’s poetic is much about independence too. At the time, Georgia was a country to be rebuilt, where the simplest things could be incredibly difficult, like providing electricity and heating. A completely new infrastructure had to be put in place after the old order went crumbling down with the USSR. Accordingly, society had to transform as well. In order to do so, Georgia could count on a number of incredibly solid foundational pillars: its history, dating back thousands of years (as far back as the Bronze age, some argue), its ancient and still robust traditions, a strong national identity and pride, and of course its religion. The Georgian church – orthodox but autocephalous, separated from both Moscow and Athens – was strongly opposed during the USSR and its secularisation policy, and consequently ended up playing a central role in the reconstruction of the national identity. People had been forbidden to practice their religion out in the open for decades, so going back to it was a huge part of finding their freedom again. In art, too, representing religious themes, alongside nature and other national symbols, was a freeing and identitarian gesture, celebrating life in a new possible world that had yet to be formed – and where difficulties were still the defining characteristic for most people. Yet, a delicate enthusiasm was also there – as Georgians started imagining their future and opening up to it. All of this is present in Abramishvili’s multifaced works, where repletion and uniqueness, the delicacy of colours and the power of the subjects, hang in a delicate balance.
THE GARDEN AS A BONDING ELEMENT
The one bonding element, in a way, is the garden. “Merab Abramishvili – writes Tsikoridze – is a ‘garden architect’. The world he wishes for is a garden, or rather its archetype: ‘The Garden of Eden’”. Again, in a world that could be brutal, through his painting he was giving life to the delicate paradise that could potentially be. In doing so, vegetation holds a special place. Trees, leaves and plants are all over, down to their roots, in a quite uncommon way – according to Tsikoridze, he “depicted plants in an unusual manner, in their entirety, with their roots displayed, as if following their concealed, underground existence. This reveals his position as an artist. He likewise follows the ‘roots’ of culture – not only of Georgian, but of world culture”. His art is down to the roots, where, hidden underground, everything connects and another world lives on.
Indeed, as Tsikoridze argues, it is not just about Georgia either – in Abramishvili’s paintings, influences from all along the Silk Road are clearly visible. Colours, natural elements, patterns and fabrics: everything speaks of the famous, fertile road connecting East and West. Chinese-looking patterns and oriental sceneries collide with typically Caucasian details. Middle eastern figures are found in either paradise or hell alongside Georgian wine cups and oriental building façades. The painting technique enhances the juxtaposition. Abramishvili’s overlapping layers and delicate tones, one translucent over the other, speak precisely to the layered nature of Georgian identity, an eternal bridge between East and West.
LINK
- TINA DION - October 2, 2026
- Laila Ajjawi: “Something a girl was not supposed to do” - June 19, 2026
- The Art Biennale is alive and well - May 22, 2026
