ELENE CHANTLADZE

May 6th - June 19th

FIERMAN presents the US solo debut of Georgian artist Elene Chantladze. For many years, Chantladze created art and writing in the margins of a life spent working in the sanitariums of Tskaltubo, Georgia, and supporting her children and grandchildren. However, since she was young, she has been discovering images and stories held in the possibility of what others did not see. Like an early astronomer making sense of the universe by reading constellations of stars as beasts or mythological figures, she scries characters and scenes hidden in the coffee stains on a thrown out piece of cardboard or in the striations on stones she would collect at the river’s edge. In the discarded and overlooked detritus of everyday life, Chantladze recognized the means to represent the visions that populated her mind. Using both traditional media—gouache and pens—and the unconventional—elderberry juice, charcoal, kerosene—on old chocolate boxes or plastic lids, she renders views of a countryside populated with animals and children or of crowds gathering to celebrate weddings or other rituals that reflect the life and customs that surround her. Gestural and evocative, her hand darts across these compositions with the immediacy of a diary entry, conjuring faces from the sea, birds from the sky, flowers from the forest.

While easy to characterize her work as fanciful and folkloric, they are not just charming pastoral idylls. Moments of social critique dot her painterly landscape. Distraught brides, monstrous bridegrooms, and bereaved mothers are found across her work and refer to the patriarchal demands on women, especially through marriage and caregiving. These aspects of a latent feminist consciousness extrapolate hints of the autobiographical into a larger commentary on gendered relations. In this way, Chantladze does not merely chronicle regional traditions but records her singular vision of the world. She often makes references to literature, including the nascent feminism of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, or current events, including the Covid pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the ongoing Russian occupation of regions in Georgia.

Artist Ser Serpas defines the stakes of Chantladze’s work: “What it takes to appear in her world, a certain angling on uneven surfaces, textures taken not borrowed, disavowed of their beauty they avoid sanding down, willow wisps, the edges scratch at who and what they were.”[1] Representing a world and denoting its meanings is a power that Chantladze commands through her work—making viewers recognize, at last, what she has seen all along. These paintings and drawings possess the ephemerality of both a dream and a scrap of paper: She commemorates the fragile nature of the easily disregarded in the intertwined relationship between subject and material. It is from this merging of humble forms and processes that Chantladze herself emerges from the margins.

Elene Chantladze lives and works Tskaltubo, Georgia. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Gallery Nectar, Tbilisi; LC Queisser, Tbilisi; and Modern Art, London. With artist Ser Serpas, she had an exhibition at Conceptual Fine Arts, Milan, and is currently in the group exhibition “girls, girls, girls,” curated by Simone Rocha at Lismore Castle Arts in Lismore Ireland. This exhibition was curated by Miciah Hussey.