Georgia: With the support of the Ministry of Culture of Georgia, a retrospective exhibition of artist Tamaz Varvaridze was opened in the Dimitri Shevardnadze National Gallery. The exhibition presents more than 50 works created from 1968 to now.
The opening of the exhibition was attended by the head of the exhibition department of Dimitri Shevardnadze National Gallery, curator of the exhibition Alexandra Gabunia, rector of the Academy of Art Karaman Kutateladze, members of the artist’s family and other invited guests.
Tamaz Varvaridze stands out among Georgian painters of the XX century 70s as an artist who clearly follows individual handwriting aesthetic conceptualism. He is the founder of the latest Georgian graphic school and a prominent representative of poster art, an educator of generations of graphic artists and graphic designers, and a teacher who has deserved international recognition.
During the Soviet period, it was very difficult to find a suitable form of artistic representation of reality. Nonetheless, the artist created works that were different from a foreign and ideological context at the time. Aesthetic perception of space characterizes his artistic searches.
At the same time, despite the independence of details, it manages to consolidate them through abstract communication. Using minimal use of visual elements, the artist creates a system that determines the direction of movement on a surreal, scattered, less colourful, black-and-white contrast.
Four decades later, there is already an experience of seeing the past from afar that makes us think once again about the eternal and the past. Clear examples of this are the cycle of the artist’s graphic series “Order” – print-like, hand-made, symmetrically arranged stone-like objects – 1, 2, 3… ; Philosophical-mathematical modeling of the real world, aiming to create sophisticated systems; “Variations on the theme of Georgian alphabet” – the fusion of the graphic originality and modernity of the oldest Georgian alphabet among 14 ancient alphabets, understanding tradition by philosophical categories as an element, presentation of a subject in art, while the essence of the subject gains a symbolic character and does not lose it To the sound of it.
Tamaz Varvaridze is a thoughtful artist. His work is important to introduce modern Georgian culture.
The National Gallery will host the exhibition of Tamaz Varvaridze’s works until November 14.
