Rusudan Petviashvili's US debut

 By EKIN ERKAN  March 17, 2025

         When the Georgian artist, Rusudan Petviashvili (born in Tblisi on January 25, 1968), exhibited her work at Paris at the green age of twelve, Pablo Picasso lauded her works as “genius”. Legend has it that she had started painting at one and a half years old, exacting reems of works on paper, and had her first exhibition at age six. Over the next few years, she showed in Moscow, Tbilisi, Paris, and Budapest, with a press conference called at Saint-Yorre to discuss the nascent artist's scintillating paintings. She graduated from the Tbilisi State Academy of Art, where she perfected her "one-touch" technique, exacting drawings without removing her pen or colored pencil from the sheet. Today, Petviashvili's works are in the permanent collection of numerous venerable international museums, including the National Museum of Art (Tbilisi), the National Museum of Adjara (Batumi) and the Museum of Arts (Kutaisi). She has also been collected by the likes of Eduard Shevardnadze and Ilham Aliyev, amongst others. Over the subsequent decades, she also illustrated numerous books of folklore, including Georgian Folk Tales (1984) and Shota Rustaveli’s The Knight in the Panther’s Skin (1956).

Love (2023) by Rusudan Petviashvili

         One of Petviashvili’s most notable achievements is her painted miniatures for the Gospel of the Holy Trinity Cathedral, where she led an entourage of artists and scholars in rendering the largest hand-written extant Bible in Old Georgian, which was subsequently shown at the Holy Trinity Cathedral of Tbilisi (Georgian: თბილისის წმინდა სამების საკათედრო ტაძარი). A May 2000 BBC article reported that "[t]he bible is being hand-painted by a group of Georgian artists led by Rusudan Petviashvili, whose childhood drawings were described by Picasso as works of genius." The team, spearheaded by Petviashvili, was a ten-year project, with bible scholars and calligraphers working in tandem. The Gospels were written on parchment in ancient Georgian. The finished project was placed in a vault "brought out during special services by three specially chosen churchmen". Petviashvili’s luminous gilded Easter and Christmas illustrations are elaborate and sensuous, reminiscent of Natalia Goncharova’s scenography.

Sheets from Petviashvili's hand-painted Bible   

         Curator Marita Damenia conspectus, “Blessed are the Peacemakers” at Kate Oh Gallery and her concurrent eponymous exhibition at Artifact Projects together demonstrate that Petviashvili also occupies an important place within the history of Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau is oft characterized by a kind of sweeping ornamental Expressionism, one that similarly informs the flayed figure of Schiele and the crammed gilded surface texture in his mentor, Klimt. Barbara Rose, in her Artforum article "Filthy Pictures: Some Chapters in the History of Taste" (1965), attributes a kind of “horror vacui” to “Art Nouveau ornament, to which their tangled, febrile arabesques are related” writing that:

“In Klimt, the multiplicity of small, irregular forms remains a patchwork of fragments, which never coheres into any decisive unity, whereas in Schiele’s more linear style, the sameness of line and its crabbed, involuted character are as much a sign of a limited content as they are of a limited and unvariegated sense of form. But these pictures raise interesting questions, both about expression and about the decorative in art, questions which seem, at a time when an Expressionistic style has been rejected for an essentially decorative one, particularly relevant.”

         Notably, Petviashvili’s approach is not the Art Nouveau of ornament but a more folk rendering imbricated in the history of graphic, theatrical figuration. This is a tradition punctuated by other Art Nouveau painters and illustrators including Alphonese Mucha, Aubrey Beardsley, Tamara de Lempicka, and Gerda Wegener, all of whom depict slender, swan-like women with Mogdiliani or Indenbaum-stylized pallid moon faces. Petviashvili’s noses and mouths, like Lempicka’s, recall intaglio details and “helmet-cut” strands of hair. Receding cheekbones and almond sliver eyes characterize Petviashvili’ bursting, dashing figures who are often joined in a rabble of mirror images.

Untitled watercolor (2025) by Rusudan Petviashvili

         It is curious that this is not the tradition that Petviashvili’s work has traditionally been contextualized within. In the February 1989 exhibition, "Tbilisi’s Montmartre,” which included over 200 paintings, Petviashvili’s work was curated beside Tamaz Kakabadze, Temo Tskhovrebashvili, Dato Maisashvili, and Levan Vardosanidze, amongst other Georgian painters—none of whom are as well known today as Petviashvili. Curiously, a Cold War-era Defense Technical Information Center report, dedicated to keeping abreast with cultural goings-on in Easter Europe, produced a review of the show. The anonymous reviewer recognized the heterogeneity amongst the works averring that, given the diversity in styles and subjects, all one can say about the works in total is that they “introduce the visitor to a world of rich fantasy full of surprises and discoveries”. This is all too general a claim. But the reviewer then continues, writing that Georgian graphic art of this epoch, are “united by the desire to depict the world around us vividly and clearly, by a keen interest in man’s spiritual world and in the history and the present day of their people.” There is, indeed, a kind of spirituality informing Petviashvili’s paintings and works on paper.

Untitled (2023) by Rusudan Petviashvili         

         Petviashvili’s scenes cull a bygone folklore while inventing new myths. Bearded men and women steer orphist orbs and discs along pools of variegated slender faces. There is, as this aforementioned reviewer correctly espied, a hanging, palpable ethereal sense to her storytelling compounded by motley colorism. As a young artist, Petviashvili stood out from her peers, warranting travel writer, Tim Buford, in his Georgia: The Bradt travel guide (2011), to fittingly deem her a "local prodigy", though she has more recently garnered greater renown. More recently, another travel writer by the name of Alex Jones wrote in his 2016 travelogue for Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan that, of the post-Soviet artistic contemporary art semblance, Petviashvili is the "biggest" name, deploying much deserved approbation for her vivid paintings and drawings "of densely packed mythological/imaginary images by an unusual one-touch technique" (noting, thereafter, that "[s]he has her own galleries in Tbilisi and Batumi"). All of this is to say that Petviashvili the mythos-maker is no stranger to the Eestern European artworld, having received lionization for her stippled, chromatic, kaleidoscopic fantasies, where amalgamations tumble and teem into one bulbous nether-creatures.

Happiness of Safety (2024) by Rusudan Petviashvil

          Petviashvili hews close to the aforementioned Art Nouveau artists, honing her fantastical, vivid worldview marked by beastly-seductive figures enjoying clarity in pronunciation. Women and men topped in kabalakh hat are often bedaubed into mythic beasts meting out their edges. This thematic content and a striking sense of colorism seperates her from other Georgian modernists like Lado Gudiashvili. One should regard Petviashvili as a master illustrator, for which she had garnered a prominent reputation in Eastern Europe. In John Clubbe's study, Byron, Sully, and the Power of Portraiture (2005), Clubbe describes her as a "visionary Georgian artist", highlighting the artist's exotic portraits by Petviashvili reproduced on the cover of The Newstead Byron Society Review’s January 2001 issue. It is, in turn, an art historical slight that her work has gone lesser noticed amongst American and Western audiences.

Golden Fish: When a Dream Comes True (2025) by Rusudan Petviashvili 

View from Earth (2025) by Rusudan Petviashvili 

Petviashvili’s graphic wielding-cum-colliding is rife with sinuous, dove-necked women, animals, and furniture coalesced in silhouettes and whole forms, fantastical beaked creatures rendered in detail, embroiled within a mystical narrative that has been near abandoned in the contemporary digital epoch. From a purely optical purview, the works are so intricate that the eye can spend minutes upon minutes threading the picture plane, discovering scales pocked within skin folds and narratives nested within narratives. A woman’s slender, fox-flared auburn hair threads into a prismatic waterfall along her back, it’s scintillating twist absorbing every ministration of light; a nearby table, topped with blue tablecloth, allows for her cleaved knee’s balance, galvanizing the scene with a slight haunt. The works are genuine joys that one can spend hours before. Many of Petviashvili’s scenes are theatrical, in fact, with totemic figures—women sloping into men and beasts—posited atop one another. Even the slope of an ankle or azure elbow is dexterously executed, steeped in poetic and sometimes erogenous vim. It is this command of detail that distinguishes her from works by compatriots like Akhvlediani, Gudiashvili, Kakabadze and Pirosmani, positing her in the rich tradition of Mucha and Lempicka—albeit, with a soft colorism inflected by Cezanne. This is evident not only in her oils/works on canvas but also her (non-monochromatic) drawings and illustrations. 

The works on display for Kate Oh and Artifact's dual exhibitions demonstrate the artist’s assiduous command of graphic delineation and one-touch drawing. They also, perhaps most importantly, illuminate a pocket of Soviet Social Realism-informed Modernism that has one foot in folk realism and another in Cezanne's contraction of the pictureplane. These exhibitions are a joy to view and will hopefully galvanize future curatorial ventures of other Georgian modernists (such as Lado Gudiashvili, Elene Akhvlediani, Zurab Nizharadze, Karlo Kacharava, Tengiz Mirzashvili, Gia Gugushvili, Gia Bugadze, Maka Batiashvili, Vano Abuladze, and Temo Japaridze) alongside further exhibitions of, and scholarship concerning, Petviashvili’s work. 

Exhibitions on view at Kate Oh Gallery (31 E 72nd St, New York, NY 10021) from May 29 - June 5, 2025 and by private appointment (exhibition extended); and Artifact Projects (155 Suffolk St, New York, NY 10002) from June 8, 2025 – ongoing.