During our trip to Georgia in 2010, we met a whole bunch of Tbilisian artists. We have already published works by three of them on our site (Misha Shengelia, Ushangi Khumarashvili and Vakho Bugadze). We would like to present now Kote Sulaberidze and Murtaz Shvelidze – two artists, who are very different from each other in style and approach, but united, in my view, by a post modernistic thinking.

Kote Sulaberidze (b. 1968) discovered, at the age of 16, that he is colorblind and his visual perception differs substantially from that of most people. This hadn’t hindered him to successfully graduate from the painting department of the Art Academy in Tbilisi. Moreover, Kote is now a professor at his alma-mater. Kote is “modeling” color perception, such as in his work “By Eyes of the Colorblind”, where he depicts the same landscape twice: with color distortion and without it. Kote’s series of works and various projects are very diverse in form and content. Kote likes to create surprising combinations, for instance two-dimensional fonts, signs, symbols and a realistic landscape.

Murtaz Shvelidze (b. 1965) has grown up in a house of an artist father, with a huge studio. So to say, he was breathing oil colors from the cradle. He says that “All of us have been through Cézanne period”. I have seen in no Murtaz work a local, Georgian, theme – on the contrary, he seems to use clichés from western magazines. His canvases are kind of a game in Pop-art, even though in style it reminds me the “Neue Wilde” group.

Leonid Zeiger

Gallery of works by Kote Sulaberidze

Gallery of works by Murtaz Shvelidze