Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, it’s high time we seriously talked about Merab Abramishvili (1957–2006), the Georgian artist who transcended the boundaries between tradition and modernity with a boldness most of you, little collectors lost in your contemporary certainties, will probably never fully grasp.
In the post-Soviet cacophony of the 1980s, as Georgia wrestled with the throes of its cultural identity, Abramishvili chose a singular path that would make your video installations look like cheap fairground amusements. Trained at the Tbilisi Academy of Arts, from which he graduated in 1981, he immersed himself in the depths of medieval Georgian art, not to slavishly copy it like first-year art students would, but to extract its very essence and transmute it into something radically new.
His gesso technique, inspired by the frescoes of Ateni Sioni he studied in his youth alongside his father Guram Abramishvili, was not mere technical reproduction – stop nodding as if you understand, you who confuse originality with facile provocation. No, it was a complete reinvention of the pictorial medium. When he applied successive layers of chalk on his panels, it was as though Martin Heidegger himself guided his hand in a quest for authentic being-in-the-world. Each preparatory layer was meticulously sanded, creating a surface that was not just a support but became an integral part of the work itself, much like Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh of the world, neither pure matter nor pure spirit.
The colors he used, bound with egg yolk (tempera technique), created a particular luminosity that makes your artistic neons as subtle as a pharmacy sign. This medieval mastery was not merely a display of virtuosity – I can already see some of you rolling your eyes, but hear me out. It was a profound inquiry into the very nature of pictorial representation, an exploration aligning with Jacques Derrida’s reflections on trace and presence.
Take his “Gardens of Paradise” series, which makes your trendy plant installations the equivalent of suburban vegetable patches. These works are not mere representations of a lost paradise – wake up, this is not an iconography 101 class. Each painting is a profound meditation on our relationship to time and space. The trees with exposed roots he paints are not decorative elements like your potted plants in sterilized galleries. They embody what Gilles Deleuze called the rhizome, a non-hierarchical structure of thought challenging traditional conceptions of order and chaos.
The way he structures his compositions, with vast empty spaces dialoguing with obsessively precise details, creates what Theodor Adorno would call a dialectic of presence and absence. These voids are not compositional errors, as some shortsighted critics suggested – they are as essential to the work as silence in Yves Klein’s only symphony. They create a breathing space that allows the eye and mind to contemplate the infinite, much like Emmanuel Levinas speaks of the infinite revealed in the face of the other.
In his representations of the “Silk Road” and his series on the “Harem”, Abramishvili did not engage in cultural tourism like so many Western artists superficially appropriating Oriental aesthetics. He created a genuine synthesis of Georgian and Persian pictorial traditions, a fusion Claude Lévi-Strauss would have admired for its perfect illustration of cultural bricolage. The meticulous details of his miniatures, combined with the monumental scale of his compositions, create a visual tension defying conventional expectations.
His “300 Aragvians” series, painted in 1987, is not merely a historical celebration for tourists craving exoticism. It is a profound reflection on sacrifice and heroism echoing Giorgio Agamben’s analyses of the state of exception. The way he depicts figures, simultaneously present and absent, solid and evanescent, creates visual ambiguity forcing us to rethink our relationship with history and collective memory.
Abramishvili’s religious scenes, such as his “Annunciation” or “Crucifixion”, are not pious illustrations for parish calendars – I see some of you smirking, but your cynicism only exposes your ignorance. These works are philosophical explorations of the sacred in our disenchanted world. The way he treats light in these compositions, creating transparency effects through multiple surface washes, aligns with Georges Bataille’s reflections on inner experience and the transgression of boundaries.
His repeated surface washes were not a mere stylistic effect – stop thinking like interior decorators. It was a method creating paradoxical depth, a surface both solid and immaterial. This approach resonates with Jean Baudrillard’s theories on simulation and simulacra, producing images more real than reality itself. The translucency he achieved is not just an optical effect but a visual metaphor for our complex relationship with reality and illusion.
In his final works, particularly his paradisiacal mandalas, Abramishvili reached a level of sophistication making most contemporary productions as shallow as Instagram filters. These circular compositions, with repetitive patterns and interconnected symbols, are not decorative exercises for new-age spirituality amateurs. They represent an attempt to create what Walter Benjamin called a “dialectical image,” where past and present meet in a constellation of meaning.
The way he treats animals in his compositions has nothing to do with your little conceptual provocations on animal conditions. His creatures, whether real or fantastical, possess a presence transcending mere naturalistic representation. They embody what Friedrich Nietzsche called the Dionysian, a vital force defying rational categories. Each animal is painted with precision reminiscent of medieval bestiaries, yet their presence creates modern tension forcing us to rethink our relationship with the natural world.
His chromatic palette, with deep tones and subtle transparencies, is not simply an aesthetic pursuit. It reflects a profound inquiry into the nature of visual perception, aligning with Rudolf Arnheim’s theories on the psychology of form. The colors are not merely applied to the surface; they seem to emanate from within the work itself, creating what Gaston Bachelard would call a pictorial “poetics of space”.
The influence of Georgian frescoes on his work goes beyond technical concerns. It embodies a conception of pictorial space as a site of sacred manifestation. This aligns with Mircea Eliade’s reflections on sacred and profane spaces, producing works functioning as contemporary hierophanies.
The alternation of voids and fullness, detailed and pared-down areas in Abramishvili’s compositions, creates a visual rhythm echoing Henri Maldiney’s analyses of rhythm as the foundation of aesthetic experience. Each painting becomes a breathing space where the gaze loses and finds itself, offering a contemplative experience defying our habits of quick image consumption.
In his final works, completed shortly before his death in 2006, Abramishvili moved towards increasingly ethereal luminosity as though seeking to transcend the very limits of pictorial materiality. This quest was not mere formal research – stop thinking like surface technicians. It was a profound exploration of what Michel Henry called the “phenomenology of life”, an attempt to render the invisible visible without reducing it to mere visual effects.
The symbolic dimension of his work, particularly in his depictions of paradise, is not a simple recycling of traditional motifs. Each element is rethought and reinvented, aligning with Paul Ricœur’s concept of the symbol as a structure of double meaning. Trees, animals, and human figures become elements of a pictorial language transcending traditional oppositions between abstraction and figuration.
And if you think I’m too harsh on contemporary art, it’s because you’ve missed the point: Abramishvili shows precisely what is lacking in so much of today’s production – depth that does not confuse conceptual complexity with gratuitous obscurity, technical mastery that is more than empty virtuosity, spirituality that avoids cheap new-age clichés.
His ability to fuse Eastern and Western influences was a true alchemical transmutation, creating something radically new while remaining deeply rooted in the traditions he reinvented. This makes him a truly contemporary artist in Giorgio Agamben’s sense: someone who, while being of his time, takes distance from it to better understand it.
His legacy lies not in direct influence on other artists – his approach was too personal and demanding to be simply imitated – but in demonstrating that it is still possible to create art that speaks of transcendence without falling into kitsch, of tradition without succumbing to passéism, of spirituality without sliding into new-age mysticism. Art that, as Theodor Adorno said of Schoenberg’s music, fulfills its promise of happiness precisely by refusing the easy consolations of conventional beauty.
That is why, you snobs reveling in your latest digital acquisitions, it’s time to truly look at Abramishvili’s work. Not as an exotic curiosity from the East, but as a challenge to our very conception of what art can and should be in the 21st century. A challenge forcing us to rethink not only our relationship with tradition and modernity but also our understanding of what it means to create in a world seemingly adrift in spiritual and aesthetic disorientation.