Artist: Guram Shavdia
Exhibition title: Me and Smiley
Venue: Window Project, Tbilisi, Georgia
Date: April 12 – May 31, 2024
Photography: Sera Dzneladze / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Window Project, Tbilisi
Windiw Projext presents Guram Shavdia’s solo exhibition “Me and Smiley”. The exposition combines mixed media paintings and graphics from different times. The exhibition’s title derives from Shavdia’s work, a small graphic in which the artist’s self-portrait is “overlapped” by one of the symbols of modern mass culture – Smiley, which becomes the opening element of the conceptual base of the exhibition. Guram Shavdia reconceptualizes historical figures, characters from comics and fairy tales, works of art, sports and war – archetypes established to become pop-culture symbols. The process of cultural perception and introspection conditions this practice. With humour, self-irony, intuition, romanticism, acceptance and openness, he places Napoleon and the grandmother-wolf of “Little Red Riding Hood” in one dimension, levels the prevailing cultural “values,” and transforms well-known old signs and symbols into metaphors of new meanings. The artist’s primary mediums are painting and graphics. However, the line between them is blurred through mixed media, which includes oil and acrylic paints, pastels, charcoal, and, in some cases, collage elements. The technique is always an authentic part of the concept, like the theme – impulsive and intuitive. Guram Shavdia, born in 1988 in Tbilisi, Georgia, attended lakob Nikoladze Art School between 2003-2007. He continued his studies at Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts under the guidance of Markus Lüpertz and Andreas Schulze, graduating with distinction (Meisterschüler) in 2014 and receiving his MA diploma (Akademiebrief). While living in Germany, he held three solo and numerous group exhibitions. Since 2020, he has lived and worked in Tbilisi. In 2023, Guram Shavdia and Mariam Odishelidze founded Raum, a combined work and exhibition space based in Tbilisi, Georgia.
