Lot 271
  • 271

Otar Chkhartishvili

Estimate
6,000 - 8,000 GBP
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Description

  • Otar Chkhartishvili
  • Sukhumi
  • signed with initials in Georgian and dated 71 l.r.
  • oil on board
  • 61 by 73cm, 24 by 28 3/4 in.

Exhibited

Tbilisi, The National Gallery of Art, Otar Chkhartishvili and Hans Heiner Buhr, 1998
Tbilisi, Giorgi Leonidze State Museum of Georgian Literature, Otar Chkhartishvili, 24 November - 7 December 2012

Literature

N.Shervashidze, Otar Chkhartishvili: Paintings, Graphics, Collage, Sculpture, Tbilisi: MagtiCom, 2012, p.44 illustrated

Catalogue Note

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’.