Otar Chkhartishvili Exhibition

The introduction

Hello everyone , I hope, that you are all doing just fine!

In this article I want to tell you about this exhibition, which me and my cousins attended in Tbilisi some time ago. Well, to be honest, I really love art and I paint on canvases with oil, so that I pretty much appreciate art, however, I don’t really go to such exhibitions and I don’t know why. So, this was the time, when we decided to have a look at that exhibition, which was exhibited in TBC art gallery on Marjanishvili street, which is just nearby the Marjanishvili metro station and it’s really easy to get there on foot, so that we went there one evening, until the exhibition was closed and went to the fourth floor, where the exhibition was held.

The exhibition was of Otar Chkhartishvili, the 20-th century Georgian artist.

About Otar Chkhartishvili

Well, Otar Chkhartishvili was born on July 5 in 1938 in Kobuleti, Georgia. His home was in Rustavi after being student at the university. Rustavi is a large city, which is an industrial city in Georgia and it’s a little bit far from the capital of Georgia _ Tbilisi. Just when he was 20 years old he participated in Delhi international exhibition and won the main prize.Then , in 1960, he got enrolled into the Art Academy in Tbilisi.

It’s a little bit strange, however, he got expelled from the Art Academy three times. Once, because he didn’t accept the academic dogmas, then, because he refused the Marxism-leninism ideology and the third time it was because he didn’t study the army studies. Despite of all those difficulties, he successfully graduated from the academy in 1966 with his artwork “Chemi Kera” (“My home”),which is nowadays preserved in the storeroom in the Art Academy.

Otar Chkhartishvili was one of the participants in the “Bulldozer exhibition” on September 15 in 1974, when the soviet union army went on with bulldozers on the artworks exhibited there in Ismailovski park.

One of his well-known artworks called “Elephant” was exhibited in 1977 in the Tbilisi National Gallery and it’s now stored in Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey. The “Elephant” was an elephant structure made from the jacket of a Soviet Union soldier, which really presented the real Russian politics “Тупой и сильный “, which means “Stupid and strong”. He loved his elephant and didn’t want to take it anywhere else, however, there came a time and he had to sell this elephant.

Some of his artworks are stored in London Roy Miles gallery and some of them are with the collectioners.

Otar Chkhartishvili died in 2006 and he was just 67 years old.

The exhibition

Well, the exhibition was in TBC art gallery, which is  located on Marjanishvili street no.7 and it’s a large building, which you can’t just ignore. You should go straight upwards from the Marjanishvili metro station and in about 5 minutes or so, you will see the TBC art gallery sign.

The entrance is free and you can visit their exhibitions and see them free of charge, which is a great thing, if you ask me, so that even more people go there and see the artworks of famous or not-so famous artists.

So, anyways, the Otar Chkhartishvili exhibition was on the fourth floor and we went up there. The exhibition was not just paintings, as you may have anticipated, rather, there were those installations and figures and structuresand those things made the exhibition even more interesting. I must say, that I hadn’t heard about Otar Chkhartishvili before and that’s probably because , that he was kind of diminished during the soviet period and  the government didn’t want him to be well-known to people, because he was not on the soviet union’s side, we can say.

There are many vivid landscapes in his collection as well as dull paintings with dim lights and sadness. He has paintings of Georgia’s landscapes in such vivid colours, that you will want to get inside of them and live there. And he also has many paintings of his yard and they are all different, painted in different seasons of the year and different times of the day.

Otar Chkhartishvili’s compositions and collages are very interesting, too. He has many compostitions with some iron things and cans and things like that. One of the very interesting ones is the chair, which is called “Grandfather’s Game” made in 1991.It’s a casual chair, characterized to the 20-th century houses in Georgia and there are those small pieces of some old stuff from old toys or things like that.

Otar Chkhartishvili also had many autoportrets, which kind of resemble each other, however, they are still different from each other, if you ask me.

One of the very interesting compositions for me was that composition of “Four Interior Moscow Kremlin”. That is an object, where there are glued all those medals and coins and pins and pictures and some small stuff, that there used to be in soviet union. It’s  a pretty beautiful thing if you look at it from the far away. There are so many tiny things on this object, that you can’t even imagine. I guess, he just glued everything, that he hated in the soviet union on this object to show the real Kremlin there.

Well, he also has many paintings and compositions with some fish cans and small fish, which people usually ate in the soviet union. One of the most common ones were those Kilkas, which were the cooked fish in salty water or something like that and it was a pretty eatable one, as I know.

So, the exhibition was really worth seeing and I recommend it to anyone interested in art or history, because there’s not just paintings of landscapes, but there are many historical things exhibited there.

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