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Unwheeled     Gia Edzgveradze  Maia Naveriani  Tamara K.E
 

Maia Naveriani And The Winner Is  2011  colored pencil on paper

17 January - 22 February 2015

curated by David Lillington

 

The fact that I draw from memory sometimes makes me feel like I dreamt it all.
Maia Naveriani

His works are always about the relations between artist, artwork, observer... Gia doubts his role while still playing it. This can be seen in his every step.
Ulrich Krempel

Tamara K.E. makes our own, long familiar media world appear as an impenetrable mystery.
Boris Groys

Edzgveradze, K.E. and Naveriani make work about meaning: the meaning of images, of signs, of language, of 'the cultural forest', which, as Naveriani says, fascinates because it is impenetrable. And about the 'human theatre' — they see all art, including painting, as performative. They have known each other since the 1980s. They left Georgia around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, K.E. and Edzgveradze to Germany and Naveriani to the UK. They have remained close and still in a sense represent a group — as they once really did, when in the 1980s Edzgveradze formed a number of artists around him into the 'Everything is Alright' group. They have all had success on the continent and in the US but have exhibited little here in the UK. This is an opportunity to see their work as well as an exhibition-reunion of the three artists. Unwheeled has in this aspect of their reunion in London a little of the road-movie about it.

Seductive motifs and surfaces reveal an uneasy meditation on the contemporary world and its representation. Irony and realism mix. They have all kept their sense of humour — alongside prodigious technical skill and an inexhaustible ability to change tack, in both technique and content, while remaining the same artists, with the same concerns. Their new work, to be shown in Unwheeled, is different again to previous series. Edzgveradze has made a series of collages dedicated to Friedrich — an artist whose paintings, as historian Mareike Hennig says, ‘opened up an abyss’ — while his new stripe paintings, or ‘curtains’, were made in response to the work of Bonnard and Hopper. Naveriani has spent the last six months in Georgia and will show a series of small drawings made while on the move there, alongside a selection of her large, paintstakingly produced coloured pencil drawings. K.E's new Run series uses the symbols of the sign language alphabet to quote Antonin Artaud. She likes the fact that these quotations are for most people unreadable, that this 'secret information' risks baffling the viewer, or demands commitment. One might see this as a metaphor for the approach of all three artists. With extreme self-confidence, they sometimes deliberately mask their profound experience and thinking — though it is always there to uncover.

Gia Edzgveradze was born in Georgia in 1953. He studied at the State Art Academy of Georgia. In 1989 he moved to Germany, where he taught at the Academy in Düsseldorf, the UDK in Berlin and Alanus University in Alfter. In 1997 he represented the Georgian Republic in the Russian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. In 2012 he was part of the ‘Worldly House’ project at DOCUMENTA13. He has had solo exhibitions at De Appel, Amsterdam; the Museum Ludwig, Budapest; Tate St Ives; Haus Huth, Berlin; Sprengel Museum, Hannover and Gallery Stux, New York. He has also shown at the Arnolfini, Bristol; Haus der Kunst, Munich; the National Gallery of South Africa; the CoBrA Museum, Amsterdam and Museum of Modern Art, Stuttgart. He continues to live and work in Düsseldorf.

Tamara K.E. was born in Georgia. In the early nineties she moved to Madrid, then to Helsinki and finally to Munich, where she studied at the Academy of Art. In 1997 she moved to Düsseldorf and studied at the Academy. She represented Georgia at the 50th Venice Bienniale and showed at the 1st Prague Biennial. She has received a number of art awards, including the Kunstpreis der Deutschen Volks - und Raiffeisenbanken (Germany), the UBS Art Award for Young Art (Switzerland) and the European Prize for Painting (Belgium). She has exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Central House of Artists, Moscow and CoBrA Museum, Amsterdam. The first monograph on her work none of us and somewhere else was dedicated to her critical approach: conceptual painting. Boris Groys and Gia Edzgveradze contributed essays. She is included in 100 Painters of Tomorrow, Thames & Hudson, 2014. Since 2010 she has lived and worked in New York.

Maia Naveriani was born in Georgia in 1966. She studied under Gia Edzgeveradze before completing her training at the Academy of Fine Arts, Tbilisi. After moving to London she was nominated by Annely Juda Fine Art for the Vordemberger Gildewart Foundation international prize (1999), which she won. She has taken part in numerous solo and group exhibitions in both public and commercial spaces including Liverpool Biennal; Neues Kunstforum, Cologne; Museum Wiesbaden; Sirius Art Centre, Cork, where she was awarded a residency. She 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 and Museum Kunst Palatz, Düsseldorf. Since 2004 she has been represented by Galerie Voss, Dusseldorf, as well as exhibiting at CoBra Museum, Amsterdam and Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York. She had a solo show, Future Wolves and Chicks so Far at Galerie Voss in 2012.

David Lillington is a writer and curator. Recent writings include pieces for Art Review online, Art Monthly and a catalogue for painter Mark Francis. In September 2014 he curated Death and Dying / Tod und Sterben in Vienna at MAG3 Projektraum, an exhibition featuring 42 artists, comprising an exhibition, performances and video screenings. Since 2009 he has been researching the relationship between art and death, and is a member of the Association for the Study of Death and Society. He has given several talks at death studies conferences, including the biennial Death, Dying and Disposal. In 2012 he was Curatorial Advisor for the exhibition Death: A Self-Portrait: the Richard Harris Collection, at the Wellcome Collection.

 
 
 

Maia Naveriani Clown  2012  coloured pencil on paper  150 x 114 cm
photograph by Oskar Proctor

Gia Edzgveradze Some raindrops came through the window and a tender cool breeze also touched my face,
I awoke - in the room the silver light of cool summer day mixed with the tender noises of children playing outside
and It was the first month of my pregnancy - so much depth and so much shining light on the surface
2014  oil on canvas  60 x 50 cm  photograph by Oskar Proctor

Gia Edzgveradze Tiger & Horn  and  We Two in the World  2013  mixed media 
photograph by Oskar Proctor

Tamara K.E. Run series  2014  oil on mylor
photograph by Oskar Proctor

Tamara K.E. Run series  2014  oil on mylor
photograph by Oskar Proctor

 
 

Maia Naveriani Untitled drawings  2014  pencil on paper
photograph by Oskar Proctor

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