Gia Edzgveradze "Gia Edzgveradze"

Gia Edzgveradze was born in 1953 in Tbilisi, Georgia. Since 1989 he has lived in Munich. Edzgveradze's work still breathes the atmosphere of his native country, as the sober, ascetic and contemplative character of Byzantine culture, which has left its traces in Georgia. Edzgveradze describes himself as a child of the sixties: seeking, in a lighthearted way, spirituality and the expansion of consciousness. As an eighteen-year old he had an experience that brought him, as he puts it, a religious, spiritual insight. Becoming acquinted with postmodern art from the West served only to boost his passion for content above form. Using a sparse visual idiom, he produces enormous sketches or 'cartoons'. Objects, animals and even religious symbols are woven into his sober visual language. The repetition of drawn hands makes them look like a series of votive images. A fountain pen is blown upon to immense proportions like a sculpture rising into the sky. The lower panel lies on the floor and depicts fingers lacking the power to write. Undulating rows of abstract, stenographic symbols are scrawled over the identifiable figures or fill the otherwise empty surfaces. The rhythmic intervals and the nervous hand invite a variety of readings. The multiple meanings and the meticulous execution of the work lend it an iconic character. Humour and gravity were interwoven in Edzgveradze's installation. Balancing between the trivial and the spiritual, his 'actors', animals displaced from their natural to a cultural environment, stood, in their disruption of an equilibrium, for limitations of human consciousness. (Based on the invitation text by Edna van Duyn) Catalogue: Gia Edzgveradze, 1994. Text: Saskia Bos, Gia Edzgveradze, Rainer Crone & Oliver Ryder. Dutch & English. Incl. bio- & bibliography. 72 pages: 30 b.w., 18.5 x 25 cm. Softcover. Design: Irma Boom. ISBN 90 73501 21 0. SOLD OUT