Georgia: On January 20, 2023, from 15:00 – 19:00, Rusudan Gachechiladze’s first retrospective exhibition opens in the Dimitri Shevardnadze National Gallery.
Sculptor, teacher, and reformer of Georgian portrait sculptures Rusudan Gachechiladze belong to the 60s generation. The future artist graduated from the Tbilisi Academy of Arts in 1962, where he studied in the workshops of Sergo Kobuladze and Nikoloz Kandelak.
His first retrospective exhibition features sculptures by the artist in the 60s/80s and graphic works from 2017-2020, most of which are modernist sculpture sketches.
Art critics recognized Rusudan Gachechiladze as a reformer of Georgian portrait sculptures at the beginning of his creative journey. Still very young in the ’60s, she rejected superficial realistic imagery and returned to the sculpture’s original magic and vitality. Along with this, using polychromia, the intermediate matrix of plaster has been made into the final material, giving it the texture of terracotta, marble, and bronze.
Rusudan Gachechiladze belongs to an unengaged sculptor. Despite his unquestionable recognition of talent, he never had a large command to create a monumental form.
Therefore, not a single statue of him is standing in our public space. The sculptor limited himself to the camera genre of small plastic: creating portraits and compositions. In parallel, for more than half a century, he was teaching academic painting at the Faculty of Painting in Tbilisi Apollon Kutateladze State Art Academy.
The stage sculptures painted in bronze by Gachechiladze were sacrificed in the late 1990s by coloured metal hunting campaigns. Today, only plaster options are left from his magnificent creations. Some of them are crafty-turned or rusted.
The only bronze sculpture that survived the robbery – the first version of the portrait of Besik Kharanauli – is kept in the David Kakabadze Gallery in Kutaisi.
After the end of his pedagogical work, in the new millennium, Rusudan Gachechiladze created a series of sketches of modernist sculptures. For most of them, the artist, in over fourteen years, has used modern digital technology, expanding the scale of his work and using minimalist means – chalk, pen and pencil, they are transcribed on toned paper A.
The main motives of Gachechiladze’s graphic work are athletes, warriors, horsemen fell, lying figures, “street madonnas”, war memorials, abstractions and angels; and in the sculpture – portrait and allegorical compositions.
Rusudan Gachechiladze’s work is not plural: up to thirty sculptural portraits and compositions; up to one hundred and fifty – graphic works.
The ongoing exhibition is Rusudan Gachechiladze’s first retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery, which unites his sculptures and sketches of his last-minute work. The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture of Georgia.
The album “Rusudan Gachechiladze – Unknown Modernist” was published within the framework of the competition announced by the Ministry of Culture of Georgia – “Promotion of publishing anniversary books-albums in the field of revenue and applied art.”
Ministry of Culture purchased three sculptures of Rusudan Gachechiladze for museum funds in December 2022: a portrait of Otar Chiladze, a portrait of Muraz Japaridze and a portrait of Dato Jmukhadze.
The exhibition will last until February 4, 2023.
