Tamar Gedevanishvili - Publication

Collect Art' international art platform
Review of Tamar Gedevanishvili`s solo exhibition Given Time
at Collect Art Gallery was published on the international art platform Collect Art
December 2025

“Given Time”: A Solo Show by Tamar Gedevanishvili at Collect Art Gallery, 11/25–11/04/2025, by Tamar Khelashvili, Founder of the Art Platform, Art Manager, and Curator of Collect Art Gallery

Here you can also find the Collect Art review of the exhibition Given Time

I've always cherished looking at the artworks in an empty space, as if the characters found in the works are talking to you and telling you their stories, how they were formed at a given time, what stages they went through, what they saw and where they are going, what emotions they will arouse in whom, and how they will convey their message.

In 'Given Time', Georgian contemporary artist Tamar Gedevanishvili navigates between the visible and the invisible, the tangible world and its virtual copies. The exhibition gathers together large-scale acrylic paintings, intimate works on paper, and a series of drawings on café napkins; materials that together form a meditation on the uncertain nature of time and the fluidity of lived experience.

The exhibition raises a question both simple and profoundly elusive: What is the time given to us? The artist approaches this exploration as a witness, someone tracing the places where time folds, slips, and rearranges itself. Her large-scale canvases pulse with scenes in motion: waves breaking, bodies falling, winds overtaking, the urgent desire for shelter. Works such as 'Someone Fell Somewhere', 'Flood', 'It's Windy Now', and 'Overtaking' suspend the viewer in moments of transition, where events feel both approaching and distant. These artworks seem to emerge from a world perpetually on the edge; geographically, emotionally, and temporally.

The paintings speak in the language of thresholds. A wave rises but never quite breaks; a figure falls but remains suspended in the painted field; a shelter is sought but not fully found. Tamar renders these states of in-between with a raw directness, pushing the canvas to hold what reality itself often cannot: a moment before its own collapse or completion. In this way, her large-scale works extend the exhibition's central proposition, that time may be less a linear path and more a conducting medium through which we drift, collide, and transform.

Contrasting with the large-scale canvases are the smaller paintings and works on paper, which are like fragments of internal monologue. Pieces such as 'You Are Spread Out in Me', 'My Home Is Everywhere', and 'There Can Be A Peace For A While' shift the narrative inward, revealing a psychological space made of fleeting thoughts, quiet uncertainties, and private intuitions. Here, the intimacy of scale underscores the vulnerability of the themes. Time becomes not an external force but a series of emotional weather patterns; momentary, unpredictable, and deeply felt. Perhaps the most touching element of the exhibition is the series of drawings on paper napkins, created in cafés and collected over time. These fragile papers bear spontaneous marks, observations, gestures, and impulses caught between conversations, pauses, and waiting. Their disposability makes them powerful: they are records of time not officially kept but quietly lived. In their informality, they become the truest expression of the exhibition's core idea: that meaning often emerges in the intervals and interstices of daily existence.

Across all media, Tamar's work suggests that time is less “given” than exchanged between people, between spaces, between states of being. The visible and invisible trade places, the virtual mirrors the real, and the familiar becomes strange just as the distant becomes immediate. Her images hold this instability with tenderness and acuity, inviting viewers to consider how their own timelines intersect with those of others, and what forces determine these crossings in given time.

'Given Time' ultimately proposes that reality is not fixed but continually rewritten by perception, memory, and imagination. What we believe to be present may already be disappearing; what we assume is far away may in fact be pressing against us. Through her layered works, the artist reveals the beauty and fragility of these dislocations, offering not answers but an atmosphere, a space in which to sit with the shifting nature of the time we inhabit.

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At.ge - Online platform

“Improper Intersections”: A solo show by Tamar Gedevanishvili in Karvasla, 06/08/2022 by Khatuna Khabuliani

Click here and read the article on the online platform At.ge

Tamar Gedevanishvili creates a graphics series on paper napkins: sketches modeled with speed and expression. She uses a non-solid matter to depict rapidly decaying moments. They unite fragments that are about to slip away from the person’s memory. The elapsing images of cafés resemble here the same tempo at which the images fall into the horizon of the café visitors. This airiness and ephemerality also characterises Tamar’s extensive and multicoloured painting series. It emerges under the circumstances of the coronavirus pandemic when the abstract reflection on time and the search for meaning became the normality of mass culture. The series focuses precisely on components that cannot turn into mass entertainment, and distances itself from predictable currents. It is the visual material from the period when the painter abandons the pandemic routine and does her work: to think with images.

The exhibition “Improper Intersections” will inevitably remind you of the recurring theme of Marcel Proust’s writings: psychological and emotional states of remembering things past. The artist draws utterly subjective and intimate moments from her memory and places them in a different context. In this manner, it seems, she searches for their meaning while inviting the spectator to play a game with their emotional intellect to solve visual puzzles. These moments may not be consciously reflected upon, but are rather the immediate impression characteristic of childlike perception.

These experiences, without yet an articulated meaning, come alive when combined with perhaps completely contrasting phenomena that exist in other strange times; they create, as it were, new realities. The paintings of Tamar Gedevanishvili may also indicate that the least significant personal emotion or even phenomenon is valuable in its own way; and in a new constellation it may reveal its value at its best, acquire full content or even allow the old emotion to wander in a new time and setting.

Already at first glance, the exposition displayed in the central hall for temporary exhibitions at Tbilisi History Museum (Karvasla) demonstrates the unity of Tamar’s graphic and painterly works. It is immediately apparent that the diptychs, the polyptychs and the other compositions form a stream, and the visualisations flow like a river. The characters in the series are more generic than specific. If you take a closer look, however, portrait features also seem to activate, and an uninterrupted compilation of unexpectedly odd stories unfolds before your eyes.

Surrealist allusions appear at first sight on various territories of nude, elastic bodies. They arise, as it were, from visions and are accompanied by their stories or by the scenes built up in their imagination. Time is relative here, space dreamily illusory-transcending the laws of physics and logic. The style of the compositions and the original signature of the painter are determined by the following unity of elements: the weightlessness of elastic nude bodies in a constantly changing specific environment−be it a landscape, a park with fountains and lanterns or a background of industrial architecture. Windows, doors and apertures in general occur frequently in the architectural setting, with a character portrayed and tightly linked to them. There seems to be an aspiration to look beyond or to go beyond.

The nudity of the characters is also of special importance. It is free of material body and weight. The nudity is the state that exclusively exhibits the character’s existential dimension and openness. The dramatic interior of the old building is very impressive, with a person indirectly protruding into it. His whole attention is directed at the ceiling as if there is a fear or an anticipation of disaster−the state of baselessness. The fragment of the several characters in a bar interior set against a red landscape is reminiscent of Nighthawks by Edward Hopper.