Tsisana Kavtaradze – a Georgian painter now living in New York City – conjures mystical expressionistic scenes tinged with the fog of distant memories. Her landscapes swirl and bend in faded tones of green and orange, giving themselves over to abstracted, rhythmic repetitions – an evocative trace of Kavtazarde’s previous career in music. These lilting, sonorous spaces are peopled by figures between childhood and adulthood, characters whose ghostly faces recall the paintings of Edvard Munch. Pictorial space – pliable and shifting – manifests their internal states and implicit relationships.

This expressive iconography emerges from Kavtarazde’s charged scenes of collective memory. Recurring caged birds suggest the suffocating binding of family and cultural tradition; children being moved by parents as by puppet masters question the legacy of emotional inheritance; crisscrossing gazes and uneasy poses betray unspeakable tensions in fantastic group portraits. Kavtaradze’s whimsical scenes invariably evoke and re-configure viewer’s own childhood experiences and family history. Her visions, informed by our memories, economically conjure entire narratives of cultural origins and personal histories. Tsisana Kavtaradze graduated from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts.