David Kakabadze Foundation presents Koka Ramishvili

Koka Ramishvili is one of the foremost figures in the recent history of Georgian art. His creative formation had taken place during the most challenging shifts of the post-Soviet period in the background and was distinguished from the very beginning by reflexivity, searching for forms and mediums suitable for this complex context. All of his projects are consistently developed, conceptually sound, and executed with a perfectionist drive. He is an artist-investigator and always finds ingenious connections between concrete problems and abstract reasoning. In his letter about the Georgian pavilion at Venice 53rd Biennale in 2009, where Koka Ramishvili presented his multimedia installation Change in Painting Orchestra, Victor Miziano refers to the artist as a "representative of the last Soviet generation" and defines his creative task as follows: “This is the complex of contradictions encountered by the “last soviet generation”, which still is in search for a universal solution. Koka Ramishvili suggested his own way of solution in his works. One feature that unites majority of Ramishvili’s art, earlier examples along with the newer ones, is their construction on the principle of counterpoint. Binary model so characteristic for the project of the present and reproduced inside out in the regional criticism, in his works is presented in an open manner, i.e. in the way that none of oppositions overshadow each other. They exist side by side.” Since the late 1990s, Koka Ramishvili has been living alternately in Geneva and Tbilisi, which further deepened the representation of different contexts in his artistic visions. In recent works, Koka Ramishvili focuses on the inquiry of interrelationships between composition structure, form and lighting, color and texture. The meditation field is a determinant in the conceptual variations of the landscapes from the 2010 painting series Back to the Future. In one of the impressive works of this series, entitled "Gonio" (160X140. Oil on canvas), the background-subjects interrelation evokes the association of postcards with views of resort towns. It looks like an abstract landscape. However, it is full of the supposedly personal and collective memory of time and space. The subject of Koka Ramishvili's interest is always the territory in its various manifestations, which may include conventional or solid architectural structures, sculptural forms built with light and reflections, where an almost hyperrealistic frame sometimes acquires a completely abstract content. Even more abstract is the series Fragments from the Garden, which, together with photographic works, was presented in 2017 at GALERIE EVA MEYER in Paris, a minimalist series of six small wooden panels with references to the history of art, the language of color, and it's possibilities, the energy values of materials, etc. “Each one of those little paintings on wood (i.e., “Black is not yours?”, 2017.30 x 24 x 4cm; Oil, amber, canvas, wood) presented at the gallery is considered by the artist as a fragment of a global installation: a composed partition of colored notes but also of silence and punctuations. It’s the beauty of the emptiness that accompanies them and gives every fragment its own sumptuousness and profundity. Every plywood canvas becomes an accumulation of pictorial layers whose intensity and vibration are accentuated by a mix of oil painting and amber.“ – Note from a Gallery resume. Art with reflexive approaches and the development of contemporary Georgian art as a continuous process that originates from the Georgian modernists and continues in the work of artists such as Koka Ramishvili is of crucial importance for the Davit Kakabadze Foundation.