Vaho Muskheli – Rubicon

The Dimitri Shevardnadze National Gallery and Art Gallery Vanda, with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Sports of Georgia, present Rubicon, the solo exhibition of Vaho Muskheli (Vakhtang Muskhelishvili). The project is curated by Vanda Mujiri.

The exhibition will present paintings and graphic works created in the last five-year period by Vaho Muskheli.

Vaho Muskheli (Vakhtang Muskhelishvili) was born in 1957 in Tbilisi. After graduating from the Tbilisi Academy of Arts, he continued to work independently. In the 1990s, he moved to the United States, where he has lived for 30 years. Currently, Vaho Muskheli resides in Seattle and is a prominent artist in America and his homeland. His works are held in state and private collections in many countries.

Vaho Muskheli’s artistic vision is unique; he perceives things differently. In his work, every topic he addresses stems from reality. Each canvas reflects his feelings, illustrating the emotions he communicates to himself and his audience. Muskheli’s relationship with the canvas is akin to his relationship with the entire world, making it impossible to convey everything in just one word. Each painting is a single word of a story, and the artist’s entire body of work is the grand narrative he tells us about the world.

Muskheli is particularly fascinated by “the challenges of researching the illusions of the three-dimensional world and the flatness of the canvas, mediating between worlds to achieve an interworld feeling.” This is why his works are notable for their monumentality. His expressive language, focusing on human and animal forms, represents fantastic realism with strong elements of personal symbolism, according to the artist himself.

– Vanda Mujiri

“No one but time should grant you the title of an Artist. It is a time that must be filled with hard work and the search for new things,” says Vaho Muskheli.

„What are the main impulses of my theme?

Man and the environment – exploring man’s function in a changing world and how his psyche evolves with these changes, emphasizing their interdependence;

The sense of the temporality of human physical existence and agnosticism in vast and endless space;

A man’s fall to the deepest bottom and the desire to fight and climb back up;

The human body, especially its dynamics of motion, is a narrative of the world. Human body motion can provide answers to endless unanswered questions. The human body holds the mystery of understanding the world, the mystique of solitude, and the choice of a free mind.

Each seemingly insignificant gesture is a word in a complex sentence. Our choice of sentences shapes the story we create.

Sooner or later, everyone finds themselves at the edge of a river, like Caesar once upon a time, where they must make a choice, that can either unleash the monster of ignorance or hold the kindness of the world just in the palm of their hand. Everyone has to cross their own Rubicon.“

– Vaho Muskheli

The exhibition will open on Friday, July 19, at 18:00 and will run until August 11, 2024.

Address: The Dimitri Shevardnadze National Gallery, Rustaveli Ave. 11, Tbilisi