Otar Chkhartishvili (1938-2006) established himself as a leading Georgian nonconformist artist. He participated in the so-called „Bulldozer“exhibition in 1974, as well as in the unsanctioned exhibitions arranged in the apartments of Alexander Glazer and Evgeny Rukhin. Otar Chkhartishvili’s close connections with the Moscow Underground Artists’ Circle and the purchase of his collage “Elephant” by the Zimmerli Art Museum (New Jersey, USA.) in 1977 attracted the attention of the KGB.
“From the late 1960s to the 1990s, I bore the cross of the anti-Soviet artist, and that’s why my art became a weapon against totalitarianism and atheism…” – wrote the artist in his autobiography. The conceptual series by Otar Chkhartishvili “Four Seasons – My yard” (1980-1998) comprises hundreds of paintings created over the course of eighteen years and represents the views of the yard from the window of the artist’s apartment in the city of Rustavi (Georgia). In this series the anti-formalist approach to art first appears in Georgian art, when the aesthetic aspect becomes secondary to the conceptual one.