Levan Songulashvili’s Giant Japanese Inkworks on Display in Singapore
On February 20, a solo exhibition of renowned contemporary Georgian artist Levan Songulashvili was opened at Chapel Gallery, Objectifs, in Singapore, a multimedia project resulting from an art residency program. Over two months, the Georgian artist lived in Singapore, explored the local culture and worked on his project using Japanese ink, creating fascinating giant artworks.
The exhibition is presented in collaboration with INSTINC and ERTI Gallery. The opening of the exhibition was attended by the Ambassador of Georgia to the Republic of Singapore, Irakli Asashvili, by the representatives of the culture and art society of Singapore and by members of the Georgian diaspora.
“Asian culture and the pulse of the future served as an inspiration for my multimedia project that evolves around vital elements of life,” says the artist of his latest works.
In 2018, Songulashvili had an extensive autonomous exhibition ‘The STYX‘ curated by Mark Gisbourne (former President of the British Art Critics Association) in two gallery spaces at The ERTI. The ambitious show included a series of paintings and film installations devoted to the self-regenerative medusozoa jellyfish. In the second space there was another projected video three-wall environmental installation ‘The System of Objects‘, filmed in the Guggenheim Museum and newly completed Oculus in New York. A recent monograph of Songulashvili’s work ‘The STYX’ co-authored by Mark Gisbourne was presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2018.
Songulashvili is a New York-based visual artist, born and raised in Tbilisi, Georgia. He successfully graduated from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and at the age of 21, won several merit scholarships and art prizes and became the first Georgian artist to earn a Master’s (M.F.A.) degree with honors from The New York Academy of Art (founded by Andy Warhol) in Painting.
"The exhibition, Stoicheîon 金星 is made of four elements, which in European culture denote the four basic substances: earth, water, air and fire,” Songulashvili told GEORGIA TODAY. “The philosophical concept of stoicheion denotes the basic components or the foundations of Being. Apart from these four elements, I put a focus on Earth’s sister terrestrial planet, Venus, which rotates in the opposite direction to most other planets and where the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east. As such, this exhibition is an attempt to understand the bewilderingly great multiplicity of the natural world as combinations of a limited number of elements. The population of Singapore is made up of Chinese, Malaysians and Indian people, whose ancestors belonged to a centuries-old culture. Yet today it represents a hypermodern city-state forming a new history. Subsequently, my multimedia project is not presented in a historical context, but rather represents the synthesis of a traditional Asian medium and modern technologies. The exposition is housed in a building of a former church, that at present serves as a hub of modern art, a photography and cinema center and a gallery, the environment of which became an organic part of the entire concept of the exhibition. The artworks for this project are done with ink and paper. Ink is my inseparable friend and I have used it for years in my many artworks, while the technique of working on paper is a common and widely used practice in the Eastern culture. So I decided to symbolically use this technique to mark my first visit to Asia,” the artist elaborated.
Songulashvili has collaborated with Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller, American rock star Iggy Pop, Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, photographer Yuriko Takagi, and composer Giya Kancheli. His work has been exhibited alongside pieces by Egon Schiele, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Marina Abramovic, Spencer Tunick, Yoko Ono, and Odd Nerdrum, among others
“In order to get better acquainted with a new environment and place, during my first week I usually stroll on the streets without direction and get lost within the noise of the city. Then I talk to the locals, observe and study their body language. Human beings as well as other objects in this world carry lots of information and energy. Then I go to the studio where both time and space disappear and I become part of the infinity. The information in my mind and new feelings merge and transform into a working process. The time spent in Asia was really important for me as, apart from this project, it helped me discover a previously unknown part of myself which has a direct influence on my art,” he told us.
As an artist, he holds a mastery of affect and transience, having created painted works consisting of large-scale canvases that feature huge expanses of grey-black washes infused with an otherworldly light; vast tonal shifts; a primordial glow that hovers between the mythic and the bioluminescent, which also evokes feelings of the underworld, phantom-like blurred apparitions, images of the so-called ‘Shades’ (Umbra), faces or presences that exist in an interstitial reality, and an in-between world of spectral dreams.
In 2018, the artist’s works were presented in a group exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts ahead of the venue’s 250th anniversary, ‘Art Geneve’, Switzerland, followed by an art residency show in Berlin, Germany. Songulashvili has received a number of national and international awards, including The New York State Assembly Award for Achievements and Contribution to the Arts.
By Lika Chigladze
Image: STOICHEÎON 金星 - The End of the Beginning. Ink on paper. 2019