Events
Posted:
3 years ago
The Silence of a Painting - Temo Japaridze's Exhibition at Georgian Museum of Fine Arts
From September 23 through October 31, the temporary exhibition hall of the Georgian Museum of Fine Arts will showcase Temo Japaridze’s solo exhibition from the museum’s collection. The artist’s lesser-known works from our repository will be displayed for the first time to enable viewers to familiarize themselves with different aspects of his oeuvre. The exposition seeks to promote the artist’s creative legacy spanning many years. Behind these previously unknown oil paintings, viewers will meet face-to-face with the essayistic, prosaic, and poetic layers of his artistry that are closely tied to Temo Japaridze’s language of expression.
The exhibition is named after the artist’s monographic work, The Silence of a Picture, bringing together his ideas and search for the essence of art in general and its true purpose. The author, in his book, uses well-substantiated theses to back up his ideas. And it is the poetic sound of Temo Japaridze’s phrase and revelation—The Silence of a Picture—that define the emotion and dramaturgy of the exhibition’s fabric.
Temo Japaridze (1937-2012) is an artist belonging to the generation of the 1960s-1970s whose works were labeled in the Soviet period as nonconformist art. His first exhibition, held at the assembly hall of the Tbilisi State University, was equated by the official establishment to “formalism and bourgeois art,” something that stood for defying the visual and ideological agenda of Soviet art. Temo Japaridze’s oeuvre offers a unity of oil painting, poetry, prose, and essay. The artist periodically switched to one of the above to illustrate his search, observations, or experiences.
Since the 1960s to the 2000s, the artist’s objective and non-objective oil paintings fluctuate between different styles or genres. He was one of the first to respond to the Western artistic space in Soviet reality, managing all the while to keep the identity characteristic of Georgian culture—better still, the two cultural models coexist harmoniously in his paintings.
Notably, Temo Japaridze ushered in painting/object, assemblage, spatial objects, and other characteristics of conceptual art into Georgian fine arts. His works constantly repeat naivete, a penchant for psychology, lyrical realism, existentialism, impressionism, and, at the same time, conservative views.
The exhibition, The Silence of a Picture, incorporates several planes of the artist’s oeuvre in the form of a bibliography, sketches, and photos in glass display cases. A video projection of Temo Japaridze’s interview serves as a sort of introduction to the exposition.
The paintings in the hall are further expanded using the artist’s quotes and poems emphasizing his poetic and critical approach to oil painting. This unity expands viewers’ perceptions of Temo Japaridze’s unknown works and brings them to making his acquaintance in general.
The exhibition seeks to visually translate Soviet Georgian art into our present day, to delve into the repository of the Georgian Museum of Fine Arts, and share its portion with viewers. This temporary exhibition will put the finishing touch to the diverse museum collection of Temo Japaridze’s art, with the addition of the artist’s permanent exhibition—in other words, viewers will enjoy his known and unknown works in one space, albeit on different floors.