“Kirill Zdanevich and His Era”

Februrary – March, 2020

19a Ingorokva Street

Installation Views  /  Works  /  About

Installation Views  /  Works  /  About

Installation Views  /  Works  /  About

The twentieth-century Georgian art does not have many artists whose life and work exhibit a particular portrait of this extremely difficult and stormy epoch. Life histories of these painters, poets, writers either developed in accordance with the requirements of radical changes posed by the era full of contradictions, antagonism, or conformism.

Kirill Zdanevich’s creative work progressed through a dramatic period of the history of Georgia. Zdanevich has experienced the fascination as well as the hardship caused by Soviet rule. Within the closed space of the Soviet Union, confined with iron curtains, Kirill Zdanevich was one of the first among the few who maintained subconscious contact with the free western world, and his interest in this free world is perfectly logical.

Zdanevich’s creative work developed and formed on the multinational and multicultural basis typical of modernist art in general. His work is nationalistic- at the same time, it brings common ideas of various cultural traditions together. In any part of the stormy historical epoch and any field of art, Kirill Zdanevich was always in dialogue with general cultural problems.

Life and work of Zdanevich brothers, Kirill and Ilia, friends of the like-minded avant-garde artists from Moscow, Petersburg, and Paris, was the phenomenon that determined Georgian modernist culture. Together with a group of like-minded people living in Tbilisi, the Zdanevich brothers formed an epoch, ‘Tbilisi Avant-Garde’ which brought world recognition to Georgian art a long time ago.