Otar Chkhartishvili

Tbilisi, 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

N.Shervashidze, Otar Chkhartishvili: Paintings, Graphics, Collage, Sculpture, Tbilisi, 2012, p.174 illustrated

There is a vertical crease from folding running through the centre of the sheet. The edges are uneven and show signs of wear and tear, especially the right edge. The corners are worn, especially the top right and the bottom right. There are pinholes in each of the four corners. The support has discoloured in line with age and there are spots of dirt and stains in places. Held in a simple black frame behind glass. Unexamined out of frame.
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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’.