Tamuna Sirbiladze. Not Cool but Compelling
The first institutional solo exhibition featuring the art of Tamuna Sirbiladze (1971鈥�2016) will encompass painting, drawing, and installation. Born in Tbilisi, Sirbiladze developed her signature style in Vienna, distinguished by its highly expressive approach and anthropomorphic visual language.
Recurring themes in Sirbiladze鈥檚 paintings include the human body, sexuality, and vulnerability, which she initially captured in a boldly figurative manner using a consummate formal vocabulary before increasingly turning to abstraction. Already at an early stage, an unsparing, sometimes even graphic, quality emerged in the depictions of these subjects, all the while incorporating the artist鈥檚 self-scrutiny (and self-questioning). Her work also demonstrates an intensive engagement with the canon of art and painting, expressed in the meticulous study of iconic works by the Old Masters. Sirbiladze interprets these examples from art history with a sharp eye and a fine, painterly feel. By subjectively accentuating certain attributes, she challenges the connotations of the male image in art history. References to artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and Martin Kippenberger run like a thread through her oeuvre, as do religious images including the recurring motif of the pomegranate: Georgia鈥檚 national fruit and a Christian symbol of fertility.
Not Cool but Compelling is the pithy title of a large abstract work from 2011 executed in oil crayon on canvas. It succinctly describes Tamuna Sirbiladze鈥檚 enduring concern, namely to give compelling form to her concept of art without being bound by the aesthetic conventions of her time.
Curated by Sergey Harutoonian.
The first institutional solo exhibition featuring the art of Tamuna Sirbiladze (1971鈥�2016) will encompass painting, drawing, and installation. Born in Tbilisi, Sirbiladze developed her signature style in Vienna, distinguished by its highly expressive approach and anthropomorphic visual language.
Recurring themes in Sirbiladze鈥檚 paintings include the human body, sexuality, and vulnerability, which she initially captured in a boldly figurative manner using a consummate formal vocabulary before increasingly turning to abstraction. Already at an early stage, an unsparing, sometimes even graphic, quality emerged in the depictions of these subjects, all the while incorporating the artist鈥檚 self-scrutiny (and self-questioning). Her work also demonstrates an intensive engagement with the canon of art and painting, expressed in the meticulous study of iconic works by the Old Masters. Sirbiladze interprets these examples from art history with a sharp eye and a fine, painterly feel. By subjectively accentuating certain attributes, she challenges the connotations of the male image in art history. References to artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and Martin Kippenberger run like a thread through her oeuvre, as do religious images including the recurring motif of the pomegranate: Georgia鈥檚 national fruit and a Christian symbol of fertility.
Not Cool but Compelling is the pithy title of a large abstract work from 2011 executed in oil crayon on canvas. It succinctly describes Tamuna Sirbiladze鈥檚 enduring concern, namely to give compelling form to her concept of art without being bound by the aesthetic conventions of her time.
Curated by Sergey Harutoonian.
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Over the course of around three decades, Tamuna Sirbiladze (1971鈥�2016) undertakes an uncompromising and insistent inquiry into the potentials of painting.
Over the course of around three decades, Tamuna Sirbiladze (1971鈥�2016) undertakes an uncompromising and insistent inquiry into the potentials of painting.
In a career that spans around three decades, Tamuna Sirbiladze (1971鈥�2016) undertakes an uncompromising and insistent inquiry into the potentials of painting.
In Not Cool but Compelling, the artist鈥檚 works churn with the turmoil of life, like emotions sketched in real time.
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