Karlo Kacharava: Frieze New York 2022

References abound in the work of Karlo Kacharava, whose perspectives were global long before the 1991 independence of his native Georgia from the Soviet Union. Across paintings and drawings, he splices borderless narratives both fictional and real to picture a world sprawling with connections. Ida Applebroog’s storyboards and Mario Sironi’s shadows; titans of German Expressionism and American Pop Art; the theories of Mikhail Bakunin; the poetry of Theodor Däubler; the novels of Patrick Modiano; the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder; the lyrics of Nick Cave. Each citation becomes a vehicle and protagonist in Kacharava’s intricate network, which ambivalently stakes Tbilisi as a dislocated cultural nexus. Featuring tousled subjects and annotated with Latin and Georgian scripts, his spirited images weave stories at once particular and universal, of anarchy, longing, and hope.

A cult figure in Germany and throughout the Caucasus, Karlo Kacharava (b. 1964, Samtredia – d. 1994, Tbilisi) was a fixture of Georgian artistic and intellectual circles before his untimely death from a sudden brain aneurysm at the age of thirty. From 1981 to 1986, he studied art history at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, afterwards joining the Chubinashvili Institute of the History of Georgian Art as a researcher. Alongside and between his visual art and activities with Tbilisi’s Tenth Floor Group, he produced numerous works of poetry and critical theory. In 1990, he left the USSR for the first time, relocating briefly to Cologne. During his lifetime, Kacharava participated in up to 40 exhibitions. In 1997, he was posthumously awarded the Giorgi Chubinashvili State Prize for his contribution to Georgian art.