Thea Gvetadze. Shavi Shotebi

Thea Gvetadzes Gemälde bergen Geheimnisvolles. Ihre Bilder formen sich meist aus einer Welt der Mythen und Tagträume. Georgische Märchen, phantasievolle Wesen und rätselhafte Szenarien bestimmen die Poesie dieser Bilder.

Thea Gvetadze (1971) studierte von 1988-1993 an der Art Academy in Tiflis (Georgien), von 1993-1994 an der Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam und bis 2001 an der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Ihre Gemälde waren in zahlreichen Ausstellungen im In-und Ausland zu sehen, u.a. im georgischen Pavillon auf der Biennale von Venedig 2003, im Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf 2005 sowie in der Kunsthalle Zürich 2008.

Über die neue Werkgruppe, die Thea Gvetadze in ihrer ersten Einzelausstellung in der Galerie Rupert Pfab zeigt, schreibt Keti Chukhrov:

Black Bread with Grace The show of Thea Gvetadze bears the title “Shavi Shotebi” which in Georgian means black bread, - “shotebi” (in plural), being a traditional sort of bread. The Shoti bread is the symbol of abundance and divine benevolence. But at the same time it marks the lifestyle oriented towards epicurean complacency, feasting, prosperity and peace – the features which happen to be the embodiment of quotidian life. Meanwhile the loaves of bread in Gvetadze’s painting “Shavi Shotebi” are black as if they were transformed into the uneatable substance or objects, that no more have to do with the everyday demands. In Russian avanguard the black (e.g. the black in the suprematist paintings) had the same function as the golden in the Byzantine orthodox iconography and was considered to be the non-color standing for the eternal, the perpetual. But in most of Gvetadze’s paintings it is not the background that becomes black as was the case with the avanguard, - where cosmology turned into total background devouring the figurativeness of reality; but it is the objects or bodies that are blackened to acquire the purport of the eidetic objects. This stance is not just about dividing the world into the material and the metaphysical, the empirical and the sublime or the spiritual, but rather about taking the matter, the material substance, the thing, the real in all its associative poetic dimension. On the other hand, the notions or meanings in their own turn are never detached in Gvetadze’s painting from matter, the touchable substance, the movement, the mood or the way of doing. In the piece called “Mamas” - the short poem of an extraordinary Georgian poet Anna Kalandadze - the letters and words are clad out of real flower petals and painted over, so that each word contains the blooming matter in the literal sense. But at the same time the blooming force of a flower and a plant becomes the allegory for the poetic force of language. The poem is a dialogue which translates as follows: “- Tell me ivy who went along the river Ksani. – I don’t know, was thinking about clouds and haven’t heard of anything. – Actually, I just asked by the way, not that I meant to talk at all”. This simple and naïve poem contains the dimension of the universal, the general which the painting transmits despite its unmediated modesty. Poetic allegories permeate the paintings of Gvetadze. In the piece called “If it takes forever I will wait for you” the flowers held by an old lady despite their fading and inability to sustain stand for the faithfulness and devotion. This painting as a whole implies various facets of life – its sustenance and volition in the central figure, its consuming vitality in the backstage figure holding out the Georgian dish khachapuri and the reverent resignation in the name of the eternal in the figure of the lady. In the “When I was young” the background is covered by an abstract imprint also clad out of flower petals and reminds of some corporeal substance which in the end can be considered as the allegory for the feminine, or as the dynamic force of anything that is alive. As it is known allegory was part and parcel of the late medieval and early Renaissance painting and the allegorical object on it looked a little absurd, paradoxical, naïve, but also such allegorical object was brought forth on the foreground to stand for the impossibility of the divine and was often put into the plastic position of reverent, mannered attitude, - the hieroglyph of longing for the impossible, permeating the picture with grace. In each painting by Gvetadze one finds such an allegorical object, gesture or movement from which grace, reverence and gratitude emanate.

Thea Gvetadze
Shavi Shotebi