Tamuna Sirbiladze: Sculpting in Colour
5 November – 11 December, 2022
Artbeat
P. Ingorokva street 14
Tbilisi
“I don’t paint on canvas, I sculpt. Color sculpts the form” – Tamuna Sirbiladze.
Artbeat is pleased to announce a retrospective exhibition of a distinguished Georgian artist Tamuna Sirbiladze (1971-2016) which shows her late paintings and drawings. The presented body of work had been created from the years 2005-2014, during the artist’s short visits in Tbilisi.
Tamuna Sirbiladze was born in Tbilisi, Georgia where she attended State Academy of Arts before relocating to Vienna to continue her studies in Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and later Slade School in London. Over the decades of her career Tamuna created a large body of work involving paintings and drawings as well as installation, video and performance. She often collaborated with her husband Franz West (1047-2012) on a number of projects.
Tamuna’s work had been widely exhibited in galleries and museums in Europe and US, such as 2001 Plakatentwürfe with Gisela Capitain in Cologne (cooperating with Franz West) (2007), Inconcurrence with ColletPark Gallery in Paris (2008), Painting and Elements with Jonathan Viner in London (2010), Laszive Lockungen with Charim Unger in Berlin.
In the last two years she not only participated in the group show artists and poets in the Secession in Vienna, curated by the artist Ugo Rondinone, and in the group show No man’s land of the Rubell family collection in Miami, but also had a lot of critical acclaim for two solo-shows in New York: “Take it easy” at Bill Powers Half Gallery and “Good enough is never good enough” at James Fuentes Gallery. Her recent show at Almine Rech gallery in Brussels opened shortly before her death.
It is interesting that the work shown in the exhibition Tamuna Sirbiladze: Sculpting in Color can not be read in sequence. Rather it is tied to her main process in a fragmented manner due to the geographical distance and the pause between the dates of their creation.
Despite this, each work is united by the artist’s personal language, which shows itself through bold gestural lines and the iconoclastic approach towards the medium. Tamuna’s visual language is intuitive and rapid. At a fast pace she moves between figuration and abstraction, painting and drawing and between cerebral approach and expressive marks. To quote the artist herself – “One way or another, my pictures should always be flexible”.
©2022 Tamuna Sirbiladze, Artbeat
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