STUX Gallery, New York is
pleased to announce, "The Stolen Blanket and Other Short Stories", the first
major North American exhibition of work by artist Gia Edzgveradze. Born in the former Soviet republic
state of Georgia and based in Germany since 1989, Edzgveradze has exhibited extensively throughout Russia and
Europe (Tate Gallery, Venice Biennale, solo gallery and museum exhibitions in
Munich, Berlin, Stuttgart, Amsterdam, Budapest), cultivating a body of work
including sculpture, performance, video, photography and writing. Diverse
in medium though pointed in scope, Edzgveradze's work comes out of a rigorous engagement with art
history, philosophy, politics and theory. At times his work
reappropriates, or perhaps more fittingly "shifts"--as in his Malevich homage,
The Black Square Shifted to the Left (1974)--existing artworks and cultural objects, while overall, Edzgveradze composes a novel universe of
superimposed signs and visual languages.
Self-described as
representing "the condition when someone is left without a chance to be secure,
cozy, protected and is deliberately forced to be naked and de-territorialized",
Edzgveradze's "The Stolen Blanket
and Other Short Stories" combines themes of intimacy and domesticity with
publicness and alienation. Part of a series of large-scale paintings,
The Big Bra (1990), at over
fourteen feet wide, magnifies and makes public the artist's personal
calligraphic sketch of the ordinarily private undergarment.
Forming the bulk of
the exhibition, on view at STUX
Gallery are large-scale paintings the artist created by projecting small
hand-drawn sketches on canvases and painstakingly reproducing each enlarged
copy. Completing a short circuit between drawing and painting via
mechanical reproduction, stylistically the sketches invoke the calligraphy used
in Georgian script, while the sparse composition points to the work of the
Russian Constructivists or Conceptual art. Often underscored by a fragment
of text, these paintings depict objects and figures ranging from the quotidian
to the uncanny, each rendered in (a copy of) Edzgveradze's unique gestural hand. Part of the series, Tina
Turner and the Chest Hairs of the Jesus (2005), for example, nominally plays upon two senses of "icon" (holy and
pop diva), while adding pencil and confetti to the surface of the
canvas.
Also presented as part of "The Stolen Blanket and Other
Short Stories" are two light box-displayed photographs, Dancing Bride I &
II, which document the genesis of
Edzgveradze's Bride Project, a
series of ongoing performances that began in 1997 when the artist immediately
began dancing after finding a 1960s bridal gown at a flea market in Europe.
Replete with overtones of Duchamp's own Rrose Sélavy character, Edzgveradze's project turned a
spontaneous display of gender subversion and patriarchal mockery into a lifelong
obsession.
Stux
Gallery