OVERVIEW

Salome Dumbadze

Liste Year

Year of Birth

Country of Birth

Presented by

2021

1992

Georgia

E.A. Shared Space

Elene Abashidze's project space is delighted to present Dumbadze's work at Liste Showtime, for the first time in artist's career as a solo presentation overseas.


Salome Dumbadze (b. 1992) lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. She studied painting at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and CCA Tbilisi.

Drawing from both her direct childhood impressions and Georgian painting traditions, Salome Dumbadze creates phantasmagoric landscapes, probing the view from a post-human position.

Smoggy is a portrait of Dumbadze’s dog. Here the artist takes a closer look at the Husky, the animal closest to her, as well as the only «real» animal among the series of animal paintings in her work. While she paints Smoggy from life, all other animal figures are painted from imagination, making her canvas a utopic space, freed from the restrictive dichotomy: empirical = true versus speculative = false. A deeper investigation into the many facets of «Honesty», often interpreted as naivety – a characteristic feature of Georgian painting tradition –Niko Pirosmanashvili, the iconic Georgian painter of the 20th century would be a prominent example– might be one of the main leitmotifs in Dumbadze’s body of work.

In Georgian art historical narrative, the history of classic painting is strongly tied to Christian Orthodox wall painting traditions. While Dumbadze seems to be a heritor of both, she manages to subvert the languages of the heavily male-dominated world of Georgian painting through both style and subject matter. Working predominantly in oil and oil-based pigment on canvas, Dumbadze alludes to motifs of the 12th and 13th century canonic Georgian Orthodox wall painting, especially by taking the decorative elements of organizing the space in the interior of these monasteries –see Timotes Ubani, Nikortsminda, Bertubani and others– and transforming them into framed paintings. Here the frames stand for decoration, structure and a political position of care.


  • Salome Dumbadze, Indoor Window, Installation View
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  • Salome Dumbadze, Fake Bonsai Tree made of paper, 2021, Oil based pigment on canvas, 50 x 40 cm
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