Tamar Magradze

One Layer Below

The exhibition gathers a selection of painting and watercolor works on paper from 2023 and dating back to the early 2000’s, created during the student years at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. In this manner, One Layer Below is probably Magradze’s most comprehensive exhibition to date, covering the trajectory of a young artist from the early steps towards her re-thinking painting after years of studies and work in film and new media. 

The influence of work in screen-based media can be traced especially in some of her latest series. Smoothly following one-another on canvas, the effortless brush-strokes create a silky illuminative surface resembling images as seen on screen, rather than in real life. The real life, characterized with psycho-dramatic nature of a portrait, is seen in her earliest work The Portrait of a Model (2008). The portrait, never exhibited before, carries influences from Georgian art history, creating a bridge between Magradze’s generation and artists from the 20th century, such as Avto Varazi and Ketevan Magalashvili.

Magradze’s painting does not often speak of a reality directly. On the contrary, most of the characters in her work are imaginary creations, avatars of a collective memory. These often female or androgynous figures residing on the surface of a canvas, do not belong to any concrete geography or moment in time. Rather, personifications of various truths and myths, they float between many different times and spaces.

As the title suggests, the viewer is invited to look a layer below and beyond the given subject, creating a walk through the real to the imaginary, from the past to the present and vice versa. Drifting in-between the binaries, the works leave the viewer with echos of open questions.

About the artist:

Tamar Magradze (Born 1988 in Tbilisi, Georgia) studied at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in 2011 and moved to Berlin to continue her education the following year. In 2018 she received MFA from the Berlin University of Arts (UDK), department of Experimental Film and New Media Art. Her work has been shown internationally at various group exhibitions and film screenings. Magradze lives and works in Berlin, Germany.