Vakho Bugadze (b.1964) studied at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts from 1982 to 1991. In the 1990s, the conflict between the artist and the outer world intensified to the extreme in Georgian art. The effects of the sociopolitical environment most naturally reverberated through culture. Art was no more seen as a shelter for survival but, on the contrary, as a language through which to voice one’s attitude towards major events and challenges of the time. Bugadze introduced and established a novel conception of aesthetics in Georgian fine arts. His response to the cataclysms unfolding in his contemporary world, together with the quest for one’s identity and the challenge of preserving it amid universal aggression, is immensely sensitive and compels his artistic language to seek expressive forms. Bugadze is inspired by old photos and childhood memories, the vague silhouettes deposited in his subconscious. His primary focus is on his characters that exert brutal power and at the same time seem incorporeal, dissolved in the colour texture of his paintings. Through improvisation, the use of specific material and the creation of an intense sensation of arbitrariness, irrationality and playfulness, the artist achieves an outcome that seems to surprise him and the images seem to unfold before the viewers’ eyes. The ambivalence and positioning of figures on the borderline between the real and abstract further intensify the expressiveness and the background emotional strain.