Giorgi Khaniashvili (b. 1982, Tbilisi) is a Georgian artist working across painting, sculpture, and relief. He studied at the Iakob Nikoladze Art College from 1997 to 2002 and at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts from 2002 to 2007.
Transformation runs through his work: human figures acquire animal traits, while sacred imagery enters the unruly world of everyday life. The results are often grotesque, unsettling, and quietly humorous.
Drawing provides a link between Khaniashvili’s paintings and sculptures. Photographs and his own sketches have also become starting points for three-dimensional works. He began carving wood as a student, making boxwood icons and crosses to earn a living. In an interview, he recalls damaging a piece of wood while working on an icon and carving a small object from what was left. He liked the result and continued to explore sculpture, later translating earlier drawings into forms made from different materials.
Khaniashvili draws freely from disparate visual traditions. His early paintings incorporated the vivid aesthetic of color magazines; his sculptures bring elements of ancient and Byzantine art into contact with contemporary images and personal experience. Cherubim and angels become physical, sometimes disconcerting presences. His landscapes reveal another register of his practice, building a sense of place through broad fields of color and a measured spatial rhythm.
His work has been shown in Georgia and internationally. In 2019, he took part in the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, curated by the artist collective Slavs and Tatars. A family portrait carved in wood is held by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków (MOCAK).
Khaniashvili’s public sculpture Braids of Time (2024) stands in Saarbrücken Square, Tbilisi. Carved from yellow tuff and rising to nearly three metres, it depicts a woman whose hair winds around her body before turning into roots at the base. The shift from braid to root gives monumental scale to a recurring concern in his work: the moment when one form becomes another.
Sources
- Nastasia Arabuli, “Giorgi Khaniashvili’s Cherubim, Pornographic Magazines and Dog’s Life,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 3 December 2022
- ATINATI, “Giorgi Khaniashvili”
- Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, “The 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts”
- Tbilisi Public Art Fund, “Giorgi Khaniashvili, Braids of Time”
