Levan Tsutskiridze’s Solo Exhibition
By Mariam Chanishvili
Friday, January 17
Georgian Museum of Fine Arts is hosting an exhibition of the Georgian monumentalist, illustrator and painter of frescoes in the Sioni Cathedral - Levan Tsutskiridze. The exhibition will last through January 26.
On January 12, the celebrated Georgian artist turned 94. To mark this anniversary, the Georgian Museum of Fine Arts is hosting his solo exhibition.
The opening ceremony was attended by government officials, writers, artists, including famous Georgian prose writer Guram Dochanashvili, who delivered a speech and talked about Tsutskiridze and his art.
The exposition brings together the artist’s latest and earlier works. Viewers will be able to retrace various stages of his quest and transformation. Some of the showcased works are recent creations bearing witness to Tsutskiridze’s consistent language of visual expression.
“Levan Tsutskiridze’s new themes—such as religion, philosophy, ethnography, monuments of literature, and history as the key forms of national memory—served the purpose of enlivening Georgian art. His heroic stance, emphasis on spirituality, exaggerated upstretched figures and geometric forms nourish a kind of symbolism that has inspired generations of artists like Elguja Amashukeli, Merab Berdzenishvili, Irakli Parjiani, Merab Abramishvii, Levan Choghoshvili, and others.
To these artists, the identity of Georgia art stood for its reconsideration and amalgamation with modernity. As a stylistic trend, Tsutskiridze’s capacious and upstretched forms using pastel colors have gained a foothold in sculpture, engraving, and repoussage,” reads the description of the exhibition.
His compositions, for the most part, feature abstracted spaces. Scenes from beyond time echo medieval monumental painting, this way offering a type of subjectively reconsidered antiquity.
He illustrated The Knight in the Tiger’s Skin, which was twice published in German translation.
During the 1960s and 1970s, he was a professor of Tbilisi Academy of Arts and Polytechnic Institute of Georgia (by turns), while during 1971 and 2005 a professor of Chair of Drawing of Tbilisi Academy of Arts.
It is noteworthy that in 2002 he was invited to Italy as a prize winner of the Bogliasco International Foundation for his works of the past years.
