Forbidden Art – Karlo Grigolia

The exhibition of sculptor Karlo Grigolia covers a 6-decade period of the artist’s creative activity – from the 1950s to the first decade of the new millennium. The exhibition showcasing figurative sculptures and abstract forms, as well as portraits and park sculptures is presented by the Atinati  foundation.

Karlo Grigolia (1927-2014) was born  in Senaki (Georgia). As a student at the Tbilisi Academy of Art he studied the craft of sculpture in the studios of Nikoloz Kandelaki and Shota Mikatadze. After graduation for the rest of his life, he remained true to his own vision and creative path sculpturing  predominantly abstract forms and making drawn projects for the modernist three-dimensional forms.

Karlo Grigolia was considered a non-conformist artist as his works did not fit into the Soviet doctrine of Socialist Realism. However, the artist has never been a dissident or an open opponent of the Soviet system. It’s just that the works he created  were far from the ideologized art of monumental propaganda;  neither they matched the style of  Georgian patriotic sculpture: the abstract three-dimensional figures, which the sculptor himself used to call  plastic forms, as well as  portraits inspired by Mesoamerican or African sculpture, were completely alien to the Soviet artistic context.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the 1990s, Carlo Grigolia became a member of the Washington International Center for Contemporary Sculpture at the same time heading The Association of The Georgian Avant-Garde Artists. However, his name still remained unknown to the general public.

Today Carlo Grigolia is quite rightly considered one of the founders of the Georgian modernist sculpture.