Tutu Kiladze “Gallery – Open Studio”
June – July, 2024
19a Ingorokva Street
We are delighted to let you know that from 21 June to 12 July 2024, Baia Gallery will begin a new project – “Gallery – Open Studio” (Ingorokva Street 19a). The first participant of the project is Tutu Kiladze.
The artist will work in the gallery space to create works for an upcoming exhibition in the fall. People will have a chance to meet the artist every day except for weekends – to observe the working process and see new works.
Naïve modernist paradigm of a play, the primitivist scheme of the Avant-garde, reflection of a toy horse of Dada and freedom of children’s drawings shape positional and emotional baselines of Tutu Kiladze’s work which is managed by the purest individual signature of the author. Freedom that is characteristic of childhood, the feeling of safety, security, and grandeur of the world and at the same time a tender connection between the humans and the things, ability to turn the objects into the toys, the pleasure of playing create the structure of artist’s works. Kiladze legitimizes safe territories for her characters turning these terrains that do not possess geographical dimension and rather imply a temporal category into the models of world perception which are related to the childhood phase and naive images. The author chooses long perspectives for depiction of the landscapes and scenes. She always presents the streets, fields, forests, squares, or conditional, colored planes from a distance to produce large spatial shots or small scenes full of figures scattered like the beads from a broken necklace. This way Kiladze creates a general flow of dynamic, and what is most astonishing, manages to replicate the movements and facial expressions of the miniature creatures with amazing virtuosity – an almost impossible thing to do due to the distant location of the images. The artist draws specific gestures or features of conditional schematic outlines using this manipulation for sending out the emotional signals that resonantly transfer the audience into the childhood, fill it with a feeling of happiness and achieve the main mission of art to conduct mental and emotional transmission, to reveal a secret of transition and transformation.
The artist’s works combine the effect of Alice in Wonderland, a magical ritual, and the power of play. The figures and their parodies of the bodies, facial expressions, and gestures along with the landscapes and primitivist deformed objects remind us of children’s drawings. They present colorful fairy tales with blue waves, bobbing pools, snowflakes, and flashes of sunlight; toy horses, goldfishes, nude bathers, funny animals, colorful meadows, fountains and water splashes.