Reach Art Visual
Tel: (+995)555551171; (+995)555376386
E-mail: reachart.visual@gmail.com
Address : 5/12 Akundovi str, Tbilisi, 0105
Website: https://reachartvisual.com/
Annotation
At the Tbilisi Art Fair 2026, Reach Art Visual, in dialogue with private collections, presents three artists: Emma Zar-Khutsi, Gregor Danelian, and Lia Bagrationi. The visual fabric of the exhibition reflects “artists dispersed” across time and space, united by a shared artistic sensitivity and expressive language. Particularly compelling is the way different national and cultural codes, generations, and forms of artistic expression converge within the context of contemporary Georgian art. The early and lesser-known works of Lia Bagrationi, Gregor Danelian’s Tbilisi-Armenian identity, and Emma Zar-Khutsi’s primitivist-feminist visual language seem to dissolve the boundary between the Soviet past and the contemporary Georgian art scene, as evidenced through the dialogue and cohesion created within the exhibition.
artists presented
Biographies
Emma Zar-Khutsi
Emma Zarafishvili-Murzina, also known as Emma Zar-Khutsi (1940–2012), was born in the city of Yangiyul, Uzbekistan, and later lived in Tomsk. In the 1950s, she moved to Tbilisi, where she became part of a circle of Georgian artists. She worked as a model at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. Emma’s first husband was the Soviet book graphic artist Dimitri Zarafishvili, while her second husband was the painter Jemal Khutsishvili. For this reason, Emma Murzina is also referred to by the surnames Zarafishvili and Khutsishvili.
Emma Zar-Khutsi began painting in 1967 at the Senezh Creative House during a period of rest and artistic retreat. In 1969, her first solo exhibition was held at the House of Art Workers of Georgia. Her works are preserved in private collections across Georgia, Russia, and Germany. She was also the author of a collection of Russian-language poetry.
Emma Zar-Khutsi’s artistic practice, including both painting and graphic works, developed from the 1960s until her death. Stylistically, her work is associated with naïve art, primitivism, and outsider art.
Gregor Danelian
Gregor Danelian was born in 1950 in Tbilisi. In 1964, he graduated from the Tbilisi Art School, where he studied under Shota and Margarita Metreveli, whose own teachers included Alexander Bazhbeuk-Melikov, Eugene Lanceray, and Iosif Charlemagne.
In 1972, Danelian participated in the Republican Exhibition. In 1973, he graduated from the Yerevan State Institute of Fine Arts and Theatre. He initially studied industrial graphic design before transferring to the department of carpet and tapestry under Hakob Keshishian. Danelian held numerous solo exhibitions of his carpets and tapestries in both Tbilisi and Yerevan. From the 1970s onward, he was actively engaged in artistic processes and exhibitions. In 1988, a solo exhibition of his work was held at the House of Artists in Tbilisi.
Danelian’s artistic style evolved significantly across different decades. Between 1965 and 1975, his work explored expressionism, pop art (particularly collage), and monumentalism. During the 1970s and 1980s, he experimented with luchism, cubism, and metaphysical painting. From the 1980s until his death, he created mystical, esoteric, and meditative paintings, investigating themes such as irrationalism, the vibration of the soul, and light as an absolute. In these works, one can observe echoes of the Fantastic Realism associated with the Vienna School.
Lia Bagrationi
Lia Bagrationi is a Georgian multimedia artist whose practice examines questions of time, space, and material history. Working primarily with clay, alongside installations, textiles, paintings, and mixed media, she approaches each medium as a site for conceptual investigation. Clay, as her central material, functions as a carrier of memory, archaeological reference, and historical stratification elements that frequently inform the structure and language of her works.
Bagrationi graduated from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in 1980. She is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics (IAC) in Geneva. She currently serves as an associate professor in the Faculty of Design at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts.