17 June, 2022, 18:00
Writing with Color III
Salome Botchorishvili, Frederik Steenbergen, Giorgi Geladze, Sopho Kobidze, Gustav Samrelius
When the ambitious and modern statement of “The End of Painting” started circling in the mid-20th century, both abstractionist and expressionist artists responded quite harshly and befittingly, and in the way that these responses, within the context of the inevitable commercialization of art, still seemed convincing.
It soon became “obvious” to many, that leaving a trace by painting, or douching the paint on a canvas, was not a certain pose or some kind of mannerism, but rather a bold interpretation of seeing through one’s psyche and their surrounding infinite universe in a yet new, modernist way.
Alongside unseeingly increased possibilities of the scales and perspectives of painting (as well as other factors), the specifics of a particular place gained a fundamental meaning, and marking certain portals and attempts to examine those became fairly significant. To get from such places to the infinite universe was, at the same time, an effort to try and unite and/or see everything as one whole.
The exhibition “Writing with Color III” inspects the perspectives of Tbilisi’s “Art Portal” in a historical, multicultural, transitional, and day-to-day context of this ancient city, and suggests re-evaluation of the existing works of five artists through a “painting dialogue”.
The current exhibition, focusing on painting as a medium, is a purposeful attempt to show the uncompromised acts of five artists of different backgrounds in a setting where everything is seemingly “clear” and where “novelty” could quite possibly have a conditional meaning. Therefore, the artworks presented at this exhibition can perfectly indicate, that the conversation about “The End of Painting” is just as much an impossible situation, as it is finding the “verge”, which marks the end of the universe.
