Luka Kurashvili
1985 born in Tbilisi, Georgia. Lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. The painterly work of Luka Kurashvili emerges from the dynamic interplay of close observation and fleeting vision. The haunting quality of his paintings derives from contrasting painterly states that unfold in the spectrum between proximity to reality and emotionally driven expression. A fundamental artistic tension between control and freedom becomes immediately tangible when viewing the predominantly large-format canvas works. In them, a figurativeness prevails that Kurashvili had fixed in fleeting sketches or watercolor drawings on paper beforehand. The motifs stem from casual, everyday observations of banal actions and gatherings of people. Kurashvili finds his protagonists in his close environment; they are friends, relatives, fellow artists. Starting from his own photographic templates, on which he captures certain constellations of figures, as well as postures and poses, he selects his pictorial personnel as in a casting and then brings together individual figures in the way of a collage to form the pictorial composition. In his painterly staging of everyday situations, Kurashvili, son of a cameraman, adopts the processuality of film shooting and the freedom of decision of the director, who can spontaneously make a figure disappear from the scene. Similarly, Kurashvili seeks to allow the randomness of the painterly process to expand scopes of action and explore possibilities of bypassing narrow figurative and narrative constraints. In particular, the dissolution of figurative pictorial areas into pure gestures of painting proves to be an act of artistic liberation. Sometimes Kurashvili even pours a bucket of paint over a canvas that has already been painted in order to liquefy and transform what already exists, what seems unalterably fixed. In such impulsive actions of painterly improvisation, which sometimes take their cue from masters such as Edvard Munch or Henri Matisse, paint is engaged in its very materiality. Paint swirls out in whirlpools or runs in rivulets across the picture surface.With the organic flow of colors that, as it were, dissolve under his fingers, Kurashvili intentionally allows himself to be driven by unguided processes of the subconscious. The painter, just as he claims a freedom of decision for himself, concedes a certain degree of independence to the act of painting itself. Kurashvili acknowledges the possibilities painting reveals. By means of overcoming the laws of perspective or narrative congruence, surprise effects allow for unforeseen reactions, bringing forth dream images and shedding light on unknown mental realms. In opening up an experimental level of painterly indeterminacy, the relationship between figure and ground in Kurahvili´s settings often remains ambiguous. Kurashvili‘s paintings, which always oscillate between a reality-based illusionism and pure imagination, reflect a powerful painterly concern that does not simply disintegrate the planes of the pictorial space in abstract reduction. Instead, issues regarding compositional structures and the organization of the pictorial plane become the subject of a complex artistic interrogation by means of figurative elaboration. Bettina Haiss, Cologne 2022
Education
Solo exhibitions
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