ATINATI'S Cultural Center is presenting Levan Chogoshvili’s (b. 22.05.1953) personal exhibition. The artist's first large scale solo show in Georgia, "INTERLING," brings together all of his works spanning a 50-year-period, including 40 works (using oil on canvas, tempera, cardboard, paper, and mixed media) and five video artworks. The exposition presents all the different media used by Levan Chogoshvili since 1970 to produce artworks.
The works are exhibited in the following series:
“Destroyed Aristocracy” (1970-1985)
“Venus and Mar(k)s” (1970-1980)
“The Donkey's Way”
The works from the 1990s - videos, performances, activities, texts, and objects – echo the socio-political situation in Georgia at that time. Most of them were created in collaboration with Archil Chogoshvili, who carried out similar activities in Moscow during the 1960s, beginning from his student days.
The name of the exhibition "INTERLING" is one of the invented terms that originated when Levan Chogoshvili and his brother Archil Chogoshvili were working on their joint artistic projects. If “Interlink”is related to the unification of spaces and the accumulation of time, "INTERLING" implies linguistic links. The term also reminds us of the findings of the Georgian avant-garde, such as Ilia Zdanevich's wordplay and abbreviations. "INTERLING" is also somehow associated with Iliazd's “doing everything”. It is significant that the Acmeist poet Degen, the theater artist Petrakovsky, the realist sculptor Nikoladze, and the then Cubo-Futurist painter Lado Gudiashvili all worked together in the cafe founded by Iliazd.
The pictures painted in the last decades are conceptually related to Georgian modernism, since they were largely produced for international exhibitions of Georgian modernism. Levan Chogoshvili represents not only one of the organizers and co-authors of the exhibition, but also a participant (Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York; the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, amongst others).
Biography
Levan Chogoshvili (b. 22.05.1953) graduated from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts; he worked at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and the School of Visual Arts and Design at the Free University; beginning from the 1990s, he often worked together with Archil Chogoshvili using various media.
Founder of the Society for Preservation of Ancient Christian Art (1993).
Founder of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2000).
Founder of the newspaper “Iliazd” (2002).
Organizer and participant in the artist exchange program "Basel-Tbilisi-Freiburg", within the framework of the international exchange project coordinated by the Christoph Merian Foundation in Basel (1998 – 2008).
Member of ICOM and CIMAM (2009 – 2020).
Co-organizer and participant in the international projects TBILISI 2 – TBILISI 16, under the curatorship of Daniel Bauman (2004-2017)
