Nina Kintsurashvili

Nina Kintsurashvili’s creative process begins with what she calls ‘collection and internalization of images’, found at Georgia’s archaeological sites, Byzantine and Western art history books and Soviet-era archived archaeological data, where most artifacts have been lost since and survive only in the archived sketches.

She is particularly drawn to the idea of an absence of visual information - for her this could be anything- a misremembered shape, a fragment of a broken vessel, partially vandalized fresco,a heritage site affected by an earthquake or even a poor image found online. These voids of information and memory as well as being denied full access to an image serve as a generative force in her work, prompting her to question how we preserve, interpret, and imagine what has been erased.

Through a process of deconstruction and abstraction, Kintsurashvili  reshapes, recontextualizes, and reforms these original elements through the painterly form to the point that they end up both original and resonant with traces of their origins. Her work reflects a dialogue between material and conceptual realms, where historical references and contemporary abstraction converge. By engaging with what is missing, her practice highlights how memory is shaped as much by absence as by presence.

Simultaneously, her abstract compositions subtly evoke traditional genres such as landscape, allowing familiar forms to emerge only to be reinterpreted and transformed. In this way, Kintsurashvili’s work occupies a space where abstraction becomes a gateway to hidden structures, inviting viewers into a thoughtful dialogue between representation and imagination.

Nina Kintsurashvili (b. in 1992, Tbilisi) is a Tbilisi based artist. As a daughter of an Orthodox icon and fresco painter Lasha Kintsurashvili, she has been exposed to iconography, calligraphy and heritage conservation since an early age. After getting a bachelor's degree in painting from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, Nina received a Fulbright scholarship to continue her studies at the Intermedia and sculpture department at the University of Iowa. Since 2020, Nina has been living and working in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Nina’s work has been exhibited at Kunstraum Lakeside (Klagenfurt, Austria), Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography (Mestia, Georgia), Gallery Artbeat (Tbilisi, Georgia),  LC Queisser (Tbilisi, Georgia), Commune Gallery (Vienna,Austria), E.A. Shared Space (Tbilisi, Georgia). Nina has upcoming solo shows at Polina Berlin Gallery (NY, USA) and Konsthall C (Stockholm, Sweden).