Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili
Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili

გიორგი ალექსი-მესხიშვილი

ქეთუთა ალექსი-მესხიშვილი

გახსნა: პარასკევი, 26 სექტემბერი, 17:00-20:00

27 სექტემბერი–28 დეკემბერი  

ელ ცე კვაისარ, თბილისი 

გახსნა: 5 სექტემბერი, 2025, 18:00-21:00

6 სექტემბერი–25 ოქტომბერი

ელ ცე კვაისარ, კიოლნი

I grew up going to my father’s studio in Tbilisi, where, among
his paintings, he would have a theater maquette or two on display, testing his designs for upcoming productions. I remember him with a flashlight, tracing light over hanging transparent paper, a reference for a curtain, or moving shapes around the stage model. As I go around my Berlin studio, setting up objects to photograph or using finger lights to trace things on film, I get a sensation, like a wind at my back, that I am mirroring him.

There is a fantastical nature to Gogi’s work; it manages to walk a nuanced line between kitsch and beauty, pop and earnestness, pain and decoration. There is also a relationship to materials and an idea of a frame that I share.

As I was texting my new photographs to my friend SGR across the ocean, he replied:

“...Looking at shit through a frame... and things that die inside of it... Flowers being just barely in a frame... Things that look like boobs that aren’t boobs, but are inside of an arbitrary frame... arbitrary in my world, art view is philosophical, Beckett and shit... Having a frame, having a body, having to look at something... Abstraction only exists ’cause we have a body.”

Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle was my father’s most famous theater production. It was radical in that it was not minimal. Brechtian self-referentiality and the display of one’s means of production are themes that my father and I share across our work.

A set of Gogi’s collages exhibited here was made at the invitation of Sergei Paradjanov to art-direct his last film, Ashik Kerib (1988), for which Gogi won a Felix Award (European Film Award) for Best Artistic Design.

“Gloves,” 1994–1995, a second series of collages, use tarnished plastic gloves, which were used to make larger paintings.

Gogi Alexi-Meskhishvili is a painter who, like many artists of his generation, went into theater and cinema in order to slip by Soviet watchdogs. It is therefore organic that his illustrations for sets and costumes are unusual in that they function as artworks in themselves, through their total non-commitment to realism.

In the new photographs, I tried to mirror his non-commitment while also attempting to meet our maddeningly ocular moment.