ATINATI’s Cultural Center has steadily become one of Georgia’s most influential platforms for thinking about cultural memory, artistic heritage and the future of contemporary art. As part of the non-profit ATINATI Foundation, whose mission is to share Georgian culture with a global audience, the Center anchors its activities in a dual commitment: safeguarding the country’s artistic lineage while placing Georgian artists into an international conversation. Its latest exhibition, part of a mega exhibition cycle titled Merab Abramishvili – Transparent Memory, brings together more than 50 works by one of Georgia’s most celebrated contemporary painters, shining a renewed light on an artist whose practice fused medieval technique with modern sensibility to striking effect.
Abramishvili (1957–2006) occupies a singular position in Georgian art. Beginning his practice in the 1980s, a turbulent moment marked by political upheaval and the waning of the Soviet era, Abramishvili developed a visual language that countered the ideological rigidity of socialist realism with an expansive, humanistic cosmology. His art presents a world in which the boundaries between heaven and earth, myth and memory, human and non-human dissolve into a floating, timeless continuum. As art historian Baia Tsikoridze has written in a text that accompanies the exhibition, Abramishvili’s works ‘conjure the impression of traversing a realm of living substance’, one in which paradise and apocalypse, fragility and endurance, each coexist in a single work.
Exposition View at ATINATI’S.
Central to Abramishvili’s practice is his revival of the levkas technique – applying tempera to a board coated in gypsum – used historically for medieval frescoes and icons. As a result, the surface of his works feel at once ancient and startlingly present: his paintings are matte yet radiant, dense and yet seemingly permeated with light. His figures, animals and plants often appear as if suspended between materiality and vapour – a deliberate strategy that, as Tsikoridze observes, ‘reduces everything he deals with to a transparent substance that oozes on the verge of presence and absence’.
ATINATI’s presentation of Transparent Memory – staged jointly with Baia Gallery as part of a larger three-venue exhibition cycle – offers an unusually extensive view of Abramishvili’s visual world. The Center’s holdings of work by Abramishvili are foundational: his work inspired the very formation of the ATINATI collection, which now spans Georgian art from early modernism to the present. Many of the works on view were painstakingly traced and acquired from international auctions and private collectors abroad, then repatriated – an enactment of ATINATI’s ongoing mission to ‘locate and return important pieces of Georgian culture.’
Moving through the exhibition, visitors encounter the motifs that shaped Abramishvili’s cosmology. Scenes that are evocative of Paradiserecur across his oeuvre, rendered not as a lost ideal but as a living, pulsating environment – olive and pomegranate trees unfurl, their roots exposed like calligraphic anchors tying the earthly to the celestial. The plants in his paintings, as Tsikoridze notes, function as cosmogonic symbols, presenting as diagrams of creation painted ‘from the roots to the leaves’, and revealing both the visible and the subterranean layers of existence.
His leopard paintings – part of a group of animal images that recall prehistoric cave art, or Babylonian reliefs – glow with the artist’s distinctive treatment of transparency. In some of these renderings, the creature’s spots are imbued with a starlike shimmer, and appear embedded in a pelt that is as much sky as fur, hovering between ferocity and tenderness. These animals, abstracted to archetypes, feel ritualistic, as though they were guardians of a world perpetually forming and dissolving.
Another section of the exhibition foregrounds Abramishvili’s figurative works, including ethereal friezes of dancing women. The floating bodies – outlined with expressive contours and dressed in patterned garments – suggest a choreography of perpetual becoming. Their movement, ‘resembling flight’, speaks to an understanding of the body not as earthly weight but as a conduit for the effervescence of life.
Yet Abramishvili was not an artist of idylls alone. His Apocalypse cycle and works such as Three Hundred Aragvians and Sacrificed also appear in the wider three-venue exhibition, contextualising the garden motifs within a larger confrontation with violence, rupture and mortality. The Edenic scenes, seen alongside these compositions, become an articulation of fragility – a reminder of a world always at risk of disappearing, however luminous.
There is a tension between tradition and contemporaneity that sits at the heart of Abramishvili’s work. While his work is rooted in medieval technique and suggestive of Christian iconography, it moves beyond revivalism. Instead, he constructs what Tsikoridze describes as ‘a completely new model of painting’, which he developed in the late 1990s and in which ancient cultural codes converge with modern visual thinking. His embrace of cosmogonic symbolism places his work in dialogue with current and popular themes that interrogate myth, ecology and the metaphysics of image-making. Merab Abramishvili – Transparent Memory is, ultimately, an exhibition about the endurance of beauty, belief and imagination.
Merab Abramishvili – Transparent Memory is on view through 31 January. Find out more about ATINATI here.
