Salome Machaidze | Vancouverian Vendetta

November 10 - December 2, 2022
Vacuum - Visualization of Emptiness in Koka Ramishvili's Works

Koka Ramishvili is one of the central figures in the history of current Georgian painting. His work was shaped during a period of the most difficult changes of the post-Soviet era and was distinguished from the very beginning through the reflexive character, a precise selection of relevant forms and respective mediums of a complex context. All his projects are consistently developed, conceptually sound and executed with the application of a perfectionist drive, making the artist an inquisitive person who always finds original connections between specific problems and abstract reasoning.

In the letter dedicated to the project presented at the Georgian pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), where Koka Ramishvili showed his multimedia installation Change in Drawing Orchestra Viktor Misiano refers to the artist as a "representative of the last Soviet generation". He defines Ramishvili’s creative task as follows: “This is a unity of contradic- tions that came face to face with the "last Soviet generation", which is still searching for a universal solution. In the works, Koka Ramishvili suggested his own way of solving these issues. One feature that is characteristic of many of his creations (both early and relatively new ones) is the designing of works based on a principle of a counterpoint. The binary model, which is so well connected to modernity and is completely reversed in the regional criticism, openly manifests itself, that is, is shown in a way that does not overshadow any of the opposition sides. They exist next to each other."

In the 1990s, an especially critical period for Georgia, Koka Ramishvili was busy with artistic interpretations of the local context and its issues. During these years, he created important projects that are based on the documentation of historical facts later transformed into contradictory messages (War from My Window, Diplomatic Missions/Pronostic Eventual, etc.).

Since the beginning of the 2000s, Koka Ramishvili has been interchangeably living in Geneva and Tbilisi - a fact which led to further delving into the topic of different contexts. In recent works, his interest has been focused on the study of compositional structure, shape and lighting, and the relationship between colour and texture. One of the main works defining Ramishvili’s artistic vision, The Last Gallery, was shown on several occasions in different locations and at different times. Its first version was created in the late 1980s and sounded almost like a manifesto. Of course, the context referred to the changes, which meant deter- mination of worldviews, attitudes towards information, the process of understanding a new reality, as well as shaping of specific artistic tasks and attitudes towards painting.

Khatuna Khabuliani 2022

Music and Sound Installation Nika Machaidze