“ I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . .”
- P.B. Shelley

Polina Berlin Gallery is pleased to present I Met A Traveller, an exhibition of recent paintings by Georgian artist Nina Kintsurashvili, on view from March 19 through April 26, 2025.

“To catch a glimpse of an Artefact on its verge of a total collapse is a voyeuristic pleasure,” writes Kintsurashvili in her 2023 essay On Fragmentation. “A disfigured semi-object is about to become so purely abstract that it would soon forget its origin,” she continues. Kintsurashvili’s organic compositions, twisting and turning like marled branches, are on the verge of total collapse. Yet they stop a moment before becoming fully obliterated, maintaining just enough figuration for the viewer to grasp onto, retaining a slight semblance of connection to their origin. This push-pull tension, a freeze frame in which we catch her forms right before they dissolve into total abstraction, is the expanse she invites us into. Her disfigured forms interact with one another, living and breathing in the pictorial space like bodily matter.

After Georgia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the artist’s father Lasha Kintsurashvili, a renowned fresco painter, restorer, and calligrapher, began traveling to remote heritage sites that, for decades, were neglected by the former government. With the goal of rebuilding a lost tradition of Georgian iconographic painting, he endeavored to study and restore the disappearing medieval murals. Inspired in part by his pursuit, Nina Kintsurashvili’s artistic practice addresses and builds upon the continuity of images appearing in the cultural vortex, from Byzantine iconography to Soviet public mosaics. She observes how this imagery adapts through time and shifts with changing ideologies, hoping to “grasp some sort of totality of the way things are” and to “do so through painting.”

For Kintsurashvili, abstraction is a tool in which missing visual information can be reconstructed through poetry of a painterly form. She works by “repainting” these gaping holes that have been lost to time, history or politics. Living and working in her native Tbilisi, Kintsurashvili created a distinct visual language, one that required the use of imagination. Her subjects of investigation transform into novel, synthetic forms. They experience visual and semantic metamorphosis, shedding their inherent meanings and connections and thus emancipating themselves from the confines of ideological frameworks.

Kintsurashvili’s work reflects a dialogue between material and conceptual realms, where historical references and contemporary abstraction converge. By engaging with missing visual information, her practice highlights how memory is shaped by absence as much as by presence. At the same time, her abstract compositions subtly evoke recognizable genres, such as landscapes or still lifes, allowing familiar forms to emerge — only to be reinterpreted and transformed. Her paintings occupy a space where abstraction becomes a gateway to hidden structures, inviting viewers to consider the dialogue between representation, imagination and possibilities of a painterly form. “Everything I’ve observed, inhaled and internalized outside of the studio leads up to painting and appears on canvas when I’m working. In the end, there are no boundaries between life and what happens inside the studio.”

Nina Kintsurashvili (b. 1992, Tbilisi, Georgia) lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. An interdisciplinary artist and painter, she earned her BFA in painting from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in 2014 and her MFA in Sculpture & Intermedia from The University of Iowa in 2014 as a Fulbright Foreign Student. Kintsurashvili’s works have been exhibited at Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography, Mestia, Georgia, Public Space One, Iowa City, Iowa, Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt, Austria, LC Queisser, Tbilisi, Georgia, Ortega y Gasset Projects New York, and Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, among others. She will hold a solo exhibition at Konsthall C, Stockholm, Sweden, in April 2025.  I Met A Traveller is Kintsurashvili’s first solo exhibition in New York.

Born

Tbilisi, Georgia, 1992 
Lives and works in Tbilisi, GE

Education

• 2020 | MFA, Intermedia & Sculpture, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA

• 2014 | BFA, Painting, Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, Tbilisi, GE

One-Person Exhibitions

• 2025 Udabno (with Lasha Kintsurashvili), Konsthall C, Stockholm, SE (4/25-6/8)
  I Met A Traveller, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (3/19-4/26)

• 2023 Mute Things, Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, GE (10/27-12/12)

• 2021 Limen (with Tamo Jugeli), Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography, Svaneti, GE  (6/5-7/27)

• 2020 Unattended Act, Public Space One (PS1), Iowa City, IA (4/27-5/12)

Selected Group Exhibitions

• 2025 Field for Prey (with Charles Degeyter and Ana Gzirishvili), Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, BE (3/2-4/13)

• 2024 Expelled Grounds, Nina Kintsurashvili, Ana Gzirishvili, Salome Dumbadze at Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt, Austria (11/27/24-1/9/25)
  Field for Prey (with Charles Degeyter and Ana Gzirishvili), Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, GE (9/14/24-2/1/25)
  SIXROOMFLAT, Studio Gypsandconcrete, Tbilisi, GE 
  My Sister Named..., L’atlas Gallery, Paris, FR, in collaboration with Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, GE (3/22-5/24)

• 2023 Never The Right Time, COMMUNE Gallery, Vienna, AT (11/3-12/15)
  Painting After Wall Painting, E.A. Shared Space, Tbilisi, GR (9/24-10/29)
  Tsinamdzgvrishvili 49 / Mazniashvili 10,  LC Queisser Tbilisi, GE (5/19-6/07)

• 2022 An Ocean Standing, LC Queisser, Tbilisi, GE (12/9/22-2/17/23FIVEROOMFLAT, Studio Gypsandconcrete, Tbilisi, GE (5/26-7/14)
  Supta Khelebi: Ten Collections of Works on Paper by Georgian artists (curated by Nino Sakandelidze), Stamba, Tbilisi, GE

• 2021 Every Woman Biennial (curated by Eddy Grattan-Bellew and Ruby Streek), London, UK (6/12-7/9)
  Mazes, Microcosms, Mitosis (curated by Danni O’Brian), The Ekru Project, Kansas City, KS (5/7-5/30)

• 2020 Mirror Eye, Ortega y Gasset Projects, New York, NY (1/3-1/5)

Awards, Fellowships and Residencies

• 2024 Residency, Research Station, Konsthall C, Stockholm, SE
  Residency, (Dis)Solutions – Decolonial Encounters, Latvian Center of Contemporary Arts x Goethe-Institut

• 2020 Residency, ArtVilla Garikula, Garikula, GE
  Award, Forbes Georgia 30 under 30

• 2019 Award, Edmund S Muskie Scholarship Award, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA

• 2017 Fulbright Foreign Student Program, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA

• 2013 Award, Ministry of Culture and Monument Protection of Georgia Research Award, Florence, IT