Tamo Jugeli and Maia Naveriani - Figment
Gallery Artbeat, 14, Pavle Ingorokva str., Tbilisi, Georgia
11 April - 25 May, 2024
Gallery Artbeat is pleased to present ‘Figment', first joint exhibition of artists, Maia Naveriani and Tamo Jugeli.
Figment' serves as the conceptual and symbolic axis of the exhibition. It can be understood as something invented, fabricated, imaginary, or subjective - ultimate reality. The exhibition not only opens new possibilities for linguistic play but also creates an additional space in which images are reborn, reinvented.
The focus of the exhibition is on imagination, serving as an invisible agent that creates possibility for a new field of consciousness.
In Maia Naveriani's works, the concept of 'Figment' unfolds through intricate images and structures persistently applied with colored pencils on white paper. The dissonance of her signs appears as a "crack" in the everyday world, the gap between the real and metaphysical. The disorder and absurdity in her language destabilises cultural, social and political/historical conventions. This can be understood as the coexistence of the mutually exclusive realities, with one flowing into the other dissolving their boundaries and opening up new possibilities.
The processes described manifests in Tamo Jugeli's paintings in a fully different way. Flowing colors and abstracted objects presented on the verge of rupture make the violation of natural (physical) laws even more apparent. It seems as though figurative formations teeter on the edge of chaos and order, reminiscent of the genesis of forms in nature. Often, they are perceived as symbiotic combinations of human and animal beings. This represents a kind of modification through which the transition from empirical reality to a certain fictional reality is achieved.
Despite the absolute differences of these two artists, both in their language, approach to the material and in their working process, there is an significant commonality - both fully trust and follow an intuitive orientation, and both's practice and search process break the boundaries of cultural language in an attempt to go beyond it.
Tamo Jugeli (b. in 1994, Tbilisi) is a young, Georgian emerging self-taught artist born in 1994. During 2013-2017 she studied Journalism at David Aghmashenebeli University of Georgia and only started painting af- ter. Soon she became mentored by internationally renowned artist and writer, Gia Edzgveradze.
Paintings of Tamo Jugeli carry traces of unconscious impulses by its linear as well as color factures. An intuitive flow composed of simple elements of figures, colors and forms create complex and dynamic networks, which sometimes are transformed into shapes and sometimes are broken into abstractive signs. Each element stands on the frontier of a figurative or a plane deconstruction. Visual signs establish sculptural, fluid, spatial dimensions and attain their autonomy. We are witnesses to a game between transgration and sublimation, between the rational and the irrational.
Artworks, which have their own scale, space and limitless desire to break the boundaries can easily be read as topographic maps of brisk and irrational motion.
Maia Naveriani (b. in 1966, Tbilisi) studied under Gia Edzgeveradze before completing her formal training at the Academy of Fine Arts, Tbilisi. Having moved to London, in 1989, she was nominated by Annely Juda Fine Art for the the Vordemberger Gildewart Foundation international prize in 1999, which she won.
Since then she has taken part in numerous solo and group exhibitions in both public and commercial spaces including Fordham Gallery, Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London; Neues Kunstforum, Cologne; Museum Wiesbaden; Museum Bochum; Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund; Netwerk, Aalst; Cirius Art Centre, Cork; Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York and CoBra museum, Amsterdam. She also became a member of the group Everything is Alright founded by Gia Edzgeveradze, taking part in many performances in public spaces including Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, Museum Bochum, Bochum and Museum Kunst Palatz, Dusseldorf. Maia Naveriani is represented in Germany by Galerie Voss, Dusseldorf.
The artist lives and works in Tbilisi and London.