Otar Chkhartishvili

Tbilisi, The Artist’s House, Otar Chkhartishvili, 1981
Tbilisi, The National Gallery of Art, First Biennale of Trans-Caucasian Art, 1986
Tbilisi, The National Gallery of Art, Otar Chkhartishvili and Hans Heiner Buhr, 1998
Tbilisi, Giorgi Leonidze State Museum of Georgian Literature, Otar Chkhartishvili: Paintings, Graphics, Collage, Sculpture, 24 November - 7 December 2012

N.Shervashidze, Otar Chkhartishvili: Paintings, Graphics, Collage, Sculpture, Tbilisi, 2012, p.320 illustrated

There is a chip to the right ear approximately 5cm in length where the horn is attached to the head. There are minor losses to the top layer of the medium at the bottom of the rim and at the tip of the nose. There is minor discolouration from dirt in places. There are spots of wax on the head and on the wooden stand on top. There are scattered flecks of household paint. The work is in good overall condition.
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In the 1970s Chkhartishvili established himself as a leading Georgian non-conformist artist, participating in the seminal 1974 Bulldozer exhibition as well as Alexander Glezer and Evgeny Rukhin’s unsanctioned ‘apartment exhibitions’. The artist’s close association with the Moscow underground art scene and the purchase of his collage Elephant in 1977 by the Zimmerli Museum (New Jersey) ensured years of close KGB scrutiny.

‘From 1968 onwards', the artist recalls in his autobiography, 'my creative output was steeped in contradictions, for I found myself unable to embrace the state ideology of socialist realist painting. From the late 1960s until 1990 I bore the cross of the anti-Soviet artist and so my art became a weapon against totalitarianism and atheism’. Indeed, Informer was made in reaction to an ‘anonimka’, an anonymous defamatory letter, which halted Chkhartishvili’s first solo exhibition which had been planned for 1979.