Mariam Odishelidze – „Transitional Spaces“

September 22 – October 25

Window Project presents Mariam Odishelidze's solo exhibition "Transitional Spaces", combining mixed media paintings, textile works and ceramics.

Inspired by her experience of moving from Tbilisi to Düsselforf and back to her homeland, as well as her recent motherhood, Mariam Odishelidze explores the moment of transition from one state of being to another, the transition between cultural contexts, from life to death, from the material being to abstraction, from presence to absence,  from profaneness to sacredness. 

Abstract and figurative colourful paintings from different periods on various themes are conceptually based on the meaning of transition. The natural and architectural arches ("Theatre. My Show ", "Picninc Alone ", "At the Entrance ", "Weed"), horizon lines ("Lovers ", "Duel ", etc.), as well as figuration turning to abstraction ("Beeds ", "Pillows ")  are metaphors of passage from physical to metaphysical state. Even though people appear rarely and often schematically in the artworks, the focus is still on humans, their relationship with themselves and the whole universe of things and nature. This constant relationship is a source of humanity's physical and spiritual transformation. 

Motherhood as a significant new experience made Mariam Odishelidze interested in less toxic materials. The artist turned her grandmother's carefully maintained tablecloths, sheets and towels, often kept as dowries (Mziti) for the girls, into a source of inspiration and a part of her artistic identity. She used materials historically associated with care and femininity and transformed them into inkpainted tactile pillows and blanket-like structures. These textile compositions are closely related to the artist's paintings as if they are elements out-shaped from the canvases. 

Mariam Odishelidze's private experience as a woman and a female artist, resembling the place of her birth, Georgia's role as a transitional place for cultural, social and political contexts, is translated into her artistic language created by the synthesis of Oriental and Western art. 

Lela Grigalashvili