Ushangi Khumarashvili
May, 2025
68 Razmadze Street
We are pleased to announce that Baia Gallery will organize the Ushangi Khumarashvili exhibition starting May 11, 2025.
Ushangi Khumarashvili’s abstractions are mere facts. Therefore, we can say that his abstract canvases, which are dramatic, emotional and beautiful in themselves, pose as the item supply to postmodern realism. These are post-literary descriptions. In a sense, his painting begin to act as texts, which are objects at the same time and are fragments of a diary. Today, any slightest attempt to go beyond the drawing, to leave it, apparently, is the inner honesty of the artist, his high sense of professionalism.
Khumarashvili’s paintings are abstractions of heavy shapes and volumes, even in small sizes they resemble wall paintings than easel painting, moreover, ritual paintings on the cave wall, they are very heavy in physical sensitivity, but not from the abundance of paintwork material, which is not typical of it. Then you will even notice that they look more like paper than canvas.
In the Georgian tradition, I do not remember a single other artist who created or is currently creating such a grave abstract painting. However, with all such aesthetic estrangement, he has always been commercially successful. And, like sheet paper detection through wall paintings, it is again found that this gravity is caused and conditioned by deep lyricism.
In Georgia, it is difficult to make abstract art a stable commercial subject. Commercial paintings, as a rule, represent figurative paintings or applied art, or, at a minimum, decorative abstractions. Except when the customer has a rich collection or has a special interest.
How can it be possible for heavy, not decorative, not applied abstract art to become commercially popular? In this particular case at least, it should become heavy to a degree to become a wall painting, then go further and share with the audience the first magical art of the cave, allow them to see the movement of the human soul, become a lyrical painting. These paintings concern our deep psychology. Although Ushangi Khumarashvili is a contemporary artist, he rarely can be encountered at the exhibitions of contemporary art. His artistic career moves with very different and manages to express his own rights more individually. For that he does not need any general and supportive platform. He manages to present himself directly in commercial form to the art scene. Nevertheless, each individual video art, object or installation of the artist shows that Ushangi Khumarashvili’s aesthetics belongs to the most radical directions of contemporary art, and it cannot be that this would not be reflected in his abstract painting too. Obviously, he knows well that objects and performances cannot be sold, at least in Georgia, but he is absolutely sure that he will sell no less radical transformations of these works, his own anti-decorative and non-applied abstractions.
Many artists who painted abstract paintings did this in terms of aesthetic enjoyment, for example as composition studies for the art for art’s sake. Ushangi Khumarashvili paints his abstract canvases as everyday necessity, like pages of an artist’s diary.
Before him there is no need to dream about one thing (say, perform spontaneous actions and video performances), create another for sale (draw portraits and landscapes) and show the third in a narrow artistic circle (submit concepts and installations to the exhibition forums).
One of the merits of Ushangi Khumarashvili is that he created elite art from living avant-garde traditions, creating a precedent of the Western artistic world in Georgia; created it in a completely empty space in terms of infrastructure. Perhaps a spectator with aesthetic ambitions would like to get the works of David Kakabadze, Elene Akhvlediani, Lado Gudiashvili, Avto Varazi as investments or would like to buy some works of some artistic movements, as important artifacts of modern culture, or because some artist has become more or less well known abroad, but here, on a local level, on an empty infrastructural basis, to make a desired product out of the most radical creativity of the most dramatic nature – and at the same time with some magic to make it a ready for sale daily bourgeois supply, – this phenomenon really needs to be considered as one of the contextual artistic workings of Ushangi Khumarashvili’s aesthetic platform. It seems that interest in art is manifested due to its realism and directness. And this quality is much higher than other career attempts. We may think that his work is similar to the creation of a musical work, with noises, emotions, dissonances. This can be a kind of inspiration. But all this is probably not much more complicated than a reflection of reality with figurative paintings. This is the main idea of the work of Ushangi Khumarashvili – it reflects the immediate surroundings through abstract painting. This is not an artistic etude, he just needs to kill the signified in order to create a signifier – as a personal and understandable reflection.
David Chikladze